Leroy boy, is that you (again)?

“That’s him! Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod!”

We were cruising the streets of Tijuana in August 2005, looking for a man named Stephen Michael Cohen, a fugitive from American justice, a lifelong thief and a silver-tongued con artist so gifted that even his victims and the lawmen who have pursued him for 30 years admire him.

The man shouting in a high-pitched voice was one of those victims — Gary Kremen, a 42-year-old millionaire who, 11 years ago, had been the mark in a bold and elaborate scheme in which Cohen took from him the most valuable domain name on the Internet, Sex.com. Kremen has been pursuing Cohen for more than a decade, first trying to get his property back, then seeking to enforce a federal order that would return to him $65 million in lost proceeds from the website. In the process, Kremen spent almost everything he had — about $5 million — on lawyers.

Hands on the wheel, head swiveling, face reddening, Kremen kept on shouting as he swerved to the curb. “Get out of the car!” he screeched. “Get out! Go talk to him!”

Kremen’s eyes were wild. He hadn’t seen Cohen face-to-face in more than four years, not since the day they had first met, at a legal deposition, and failed to settle their differences. Kremen wanted a confrontation but clearly didn’t want any part of it himself. That was to be my job.

Across four lanes of Tijuana traffic, outside a black-glass office building and standing next to a soccer-mom-style Honda CR-V was a pasty guy in dumpy jeans and a Beverly Hills Polo Club T-shirt, carrying two cell phones on his hip. Cell phones, I already knew, were his weapon of choice.

“Steve Cohen?” I asked as I trotted up to him, notepad in one hand, the other outstretched. He seemed to flinch, and his eyes swept the street as he tentatively shook my hand. Walking into a cloud of his cologne, I studied the man who’d been avoiding me with elaborate lies. When we’d spoken a few days earlier, he’d claimed he was in Monte Carlo running a casino, extending credit to high rollers, getting his private Citation jet fueled up for a jaunt.

“Uh, what are you doing here?” he asked, struggling for composure. Cohen, 57, looked as unimpressive as a man can look and sounded very little like a canny international fugitive.

For the next 10 minutes I peppered him with questions, sure that I was safe because Kremen and a private investigator he had brought along were nearby in a Grand Cherokee. But then Cohen recovered and gradually nudged me into the building, guiding me into a cracked-leather chair in a dimly lit conference room in the office of his attorney, Gustavo Cortes Carbajal, known in Tijuana as El Sapo, the Toad.

The Toad’s hand gripped my shoulder, his pockmarked face inches from mine. “Mi casa es su casa,” he said. “Please don’t steal anything.” Cohen, the world-class thief, seemed to smirk too. The fear was gone, the color back in his face. The con man’s vaunted confidence returned, and his words poured out in a honeyed flood. “I don’t live here. I live in Europe,” he said. “I’m normally in Europe. Tell Kremen you saw me. No, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t. I don’t want my whereabouts known to him. The days between Kremen and me are totally over. Kremen spends his life on this. I don’t have the time and energy. If the Supreme Court rules in my favor, I’ll give you the exclusive.”

In the middle of his speech, I felt my cell phone vibrate with a text message from Kremen: cohen shooting in black building.

Jarred, confused and certain I’d hear nothing more of value from Cohen, I got out of there as fast as I could. Back in Kremen’s Jeep, I asked what the message was all about.

“Just fucking with you,” Kremen said.

When the history of the Internet is written, the taking of Sex.com will be one of its most entertaining chapters, not just because it was the biggest theft in Internet history but because the decadelong tragicomedy established a simple but vital legal principle: Internet domain names, unlike song titles but like songs, are property subject to conversion; in other words, they can be stolen. Open a property-law book. It’s in there.

That such an important precedent arose from a legal spit-ball fight between two social misfits like Cohen and Kremen is but one of the ironies here. Aside from the law and the vast sums involved, the real story is the human one, with all the complexity and confusion that color relationships. This was the greatest duel ever fought on the world’s newest lawless frontier, once upon a time out there in the ever-morphing ether of cyberspace, the ultimate morals-free zone.

Kremen and Cohen, white hat and black hat, turned out to be as similar as they are different, not just brilliant, pudgy nerds, not just multitasking, tech-obsessed, stay-up-all-night geeks with the ambition to make bags of money, but remorseless, opportunistic competitors determined not just to win but to delight in the other’s losing — and also get famous and laid in the process. “Cohen is someone just as twisted and smart as Gary,” says Sex.corn’s resident porn star, Kym Wilde, who began consulting for Kremen in 2001. “It’s what Gary admires and appreciates.”

In a phone call before we tracked him down in TJ, as the locals call his border-town home, Cohen had refused to talk about Sex.com at all. “In the circles I run in,” he said, claiming he’d invested in hotels and casinos, “sex doesn’t mix. I made millions in the sex business. I make more today. You move on.”

Of course, those are all lies. For 11 years Cohen and Kremen have been locked together as tightly as Holmes and Moriarty, or the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. In the struggle both men embraced with gusto, they not only came to define each other but nearly became the same person. Cohen grew to respect Kremen’s dogged pursuit of justice; Kremen couldn’t help but emulate Cohen’s ability to damn the consequences and go full speed ahead.

Yet one crucial difference remains: Kremen wants to win while playing by the rules. Cohen thinks flouting them makes life worth living.

Kremen doesn’t look the part, but he’s some kind of genius. Born in 1963, he grew up in Skokie, Illinois, “part geek,” he says, “but definitely a hell-raiser.” We’re sitting in a conference room in Sex.com’s vast, underpopulated office in San Francisco, after a staff meeting so full of techie jargon I’ve managed to understand only that the company sells clicks: When he wrested back control of the site in 2001, Kremen turned it into a Wal-Mart of porn, but the only products he offers are links. Each time a surfer clicks on one, the target website pays Sex .com a few cents from an escrow account. The amount the target agrees to pay, which is arrived at via a complex bidding system, determines how high on the page its link appears. When a customer types, say, “redhead blow job” on the Sex .com home page, the top position naturally costs the most. But don’t search for violence, kiddie porn or bestiality. Kremen is like Wal-Mart in that way, too. He lists only what’s relatively decent to look at. As a result he has gained an oxymoronic reputation as online porn’s Mr. Clean, who neither produces nor distributes the stuff himself.

Part of his story is that he has been one of the good guys since he learned his lesson as a kid. “I hung out with this group of stoner, heavy metal, break-into-the-school-and-trash-things people,” Kremen says. “We took all the money from the Coke machines. They called my parents, and they said, ‘Put him in the jail cell for 10 minutes.’ I became a good child.”

His father was a driver’s-ed instructor and ham radio operator; his mother taught accounting. It’s appropriate, then, that Kremen studied science and dreamed of money, but during his years of studying and working he also developed a pent-up desire for kink. This somewhat explains the presence of B&D star Wilde, who is not just a Sex.com consultant but also Kremen’s occasional chauffeur. Yet sex isn’t his priority: When Wilde was late picking us up from the Oakland airport, he banished her to the backseat for the trip back to San Francisco. He even ignored her when she flashed her breasts.

Skokie was a competitive environment for smart kids, and Kremen learned that he liked winning. He now lives in an 8,900- square-foot, six-bedroom San Diego mansion on three acres in the city’s exclusive Rancho Santa Fe community; the home once belonged to Cohen. It’s the first and so far the only significant asset Kremen has seized from “die bad guy,” as he calls his adversary. Framed and mounted on a wall in his home are the circuit boards that made up his first hand-built computer, which won him first prize in a seventh-grade science contest. It’s next to the popcorn machine and the red London phone booth, around the corner from the server room.

Something of a nervous man, Kremen sleeps in a small bedroom down the hall from the master suite; the bad guy’s room makes him uncomfortable, he says. But as a kind of taunt, he keeps all the legal papers relating to Cohen in the big bedroom’s huge walk-in closet.

Kremen always wanted to make money. “I missed out on 15 years of having fun, going to rock concerts, having girlfriends,” he says. “That’s why I had my little drug crisis.” After winning back Sex.com Kremen also got into crank, or methamphetamine, which led to indulgences with porn stars, too.

Kremen enrolled at Northwestern in 1981, and in the era of the yuppie he fit right in with his double major in electrical engineering and business and his after-school job. “He took it on himself to be the guy with the most job offers for the highest salaries,” says Steve Laico, who has been his best friend ever since. “He got all that.” But he wasn’t averse to fun. “I don’t want to call him a crazy genius, but that’s close,” says Philip van Munching, a brewery heir who was another friend. “If he owed you $10, he’d give you a check with a statement you vehemently disagreed with written above the endorsement line, so you’d have to endorse it. It wasn’t malicious. He was contentious for fun.”

After graduating, Kremen got a job with a government aerospace contractor, where he first encountered the earliest version of the Internet, then called Arpanet. He enrolled in Stanford business school, in Silicon Valley, to learn to be an entrepreneur, and he kept his nose to the grindstone. “I lost my virginity at a normal guy time,” he says, hesitating briefly before adding, “you know — 13 or 14. I had a girlfriend in college.” That’s right, just one. His final project was a study of bankruptcy.

Concurrently, a few hours’ drive south in Orange County, his future nemesis, Cohen, was moving up the criminal food chain, with a specialty in bankruptcy fraud.

Cohen grew up in Van Nuys, in the San 134 Fernando Valley outside Los Angeles. When he was little, his father, a successful accountant, left home, married his secretary and moved to Beverly Hills, where he drove a Rolls, inspiring admiration and envy in his son. “His mother was sweet, but he thought she was a real nutcase,” says Susan Boydston, the third of Cohen’s five ex-wives. “She kept the house spick-and-span, and he was a rebellious slob. He tuned her out at an early age. He felt he had only himself to count on, and everyone in his path would pay.” Cohen’s ex-wives aren’t the only bitter people left in his wake. By phone from her home in Las Vegas, his mother, Renee Cohen, says, “I don’t have anything to do with him. Sorry.”

Cohen started cutting corners young. When he bought his mother roses at 16, she thought she’d perhaps misjudged him until the florist’s charge showed up on her credit card. High school friends remember him as abrasive and cocky, always talking about sex but never getting any, a “strange duck” who sat in the back of class with “a perennial smirk, as if he knew what was going to happen and we didn’t.”

“His posture was slinky and dastardly,” says schoolmate Penny Campbell. “I know that sounds a little cartoonish, but he presented a Snidely Whiplash persona. Interesting how much a person’s body language can reveal, isn’t it?”

Not long ago the fugitive Cohen reconnected by phone with another school pal and told him about his holdings in Tijuana, “his shrimp farm, his titty bar, his ISR” Steve Fischler says. “Then I heard him say, ‘Get my jet ready.’” Cohen said it was a Citation. “Then another phone rings.” Fischler next overheard half a conversation in which Cohen appeared to approve a credit line for a casino gambler. But Cohen has had the same second-line conversation almost word-for-word with others — including me when he tried to convince me he was calling from Monte Carlo, where, he claimed, he was too busy running casinos to give an interview. He was in TJ at the time.

Cohen married young twice and had three kids. He was later jailed for failure to support his oldest, a daughter who later became a police officer. Her father had long since turned to crime. “When I was a kid, I was involved in a multimillion-dollar check-kiting scheme,” Cohen admitted to me that day in TJ. Through the mid-1970s he was constantly in legal trouble. His first arrest was for passing bad checks — all under $300, by the way. He avoided prison by pleading guilty, but while on probation he was arrested again, for stealing a car.

Charges of forgery, impersonation and grand theft followed, and in 1977 Cohen was sure he was going to jail. While awaiting sentencing, he met and married Boydston, because, she thinks now, he needed someone on the outside to protect his interests. She was in court the day his then lawyer won a venue change from L.A. County to Orange County, where Cohen lived. He was thrilled. He had a judge there “in his pocket,” Boydston says.

In the 1980s Cohen continued his life of cons. He used Boydston’s money to buy a house in a gated Orange County community and began moving in and out of businesses as fast as a three-card monte game. When the heat was on one, he’d open another: repossessions, key chains and gewgaws, computer time-shares, computer sales and import-exports; there was a liquor store, a limo service, a telephone-answering service and more — many with similar names incorporated in different states. Boydston learned later that she was listed as an officer of many of them, as were family members and friends. Evicted for nonpayment of rent, Cohen would vandalize the offices on his way out.

He had five passports, three driver’s licenses, locksmith and private investigator licenses, a plane, a sailboat, a Cadillac, a Porsche and that Rolls he’d always wanted, though it was never clear whether he owned, leased or had stolen the vehicles, and they seemed to have a habit of crashing or sinking or just disappearing — like the Rolls, which was registered in Boydston’s name. He convinced Boydston he worked with the CIA to explain his frequent trips to South and Central America, booked through his agency, Confidential Travel — all free and first-class, of course, scammed somehow with travel agent vouchers. He would actually go with friends such as Jack Brownfield, a convicted cocaine trafficker.

An electronics nut since childhood, Cohen forged documents in the garage on his own copying machine, wired his own phones and had seven lines in the bedroom where he worked all night and slept all morning behind a locked door. Cameras were trained on the door of the house for good reason. Aggrieved victims of his frauds, marshals, process servers and investigators regularly rang the bell. Boydston wasn’t allowed to answer the door or the phone. When a process server got past Boydston one day, Cohen pushed the woman down a spiral staircase and then started “slamming on me with his fists,” Boydston says.

Cohen’s lies were ceaseless and shameless. He told people he had studied at West Point and been an admiral, and he claimed to be one of the three Stephen M. Cohens on the California bar. He also borrowed his own lawyers’ names — making fake letterhead on his computer, often with the same telltale layout and typeface (he was lazy that way), with word-processing software he’d then return for a refund.

Yet despite all this, Cohen charmed powerful people — like lawyers and judges. “I don’t know what credentials he showed,” says Roger Agajanian, his first lawyer and still a friend, “but he even impersonated a judge in Colorado for several years. He let people off all the time.”

Cohen was sued and arrested so often that neither Agajanian nor Boydston could keep count, and he so frustrated his victims, creditors and the law by playing procedural games and hiding assets that they would eventually just give up.

Also during the 1980s Cohen discovered swinging, pressuring Boydston into wife swapping and group sex. By then she had learned he’d drained all her equity from the house and was perpetrating scams in her name. She finally divorced him in 1985 after he had sex with two of his answering-service operators in their bed. He had discovered computers, scamming to get one for free, of course, and using it to start a computer bulletin-board system for wife swappers called the French Connection. He would sit up all night, impersonating women (he posted under both Boydston’s name and that of his elder daughter) to lure men to pay a fee and join.

The company that owned the BBS was called Ynata, an acronym for “you’ll never amount to anything.” Some who know him think his mother used to say that to him and he’s been determined ever since to prove her wrong. Cohen calls it a private joke and told Boydston, who returned to her house in 1987 (though she moved into a separate bedroom), that he used it to mock his victims: When they came after him, all they’d find would amount to nothing.

When Boydston discovered that he was still using her name, this time in bankruptcy frauds, she finally had enough. She began going through his papers, hiding incriminating documents. Unbeknownst to her, she wasn’t the only one investigating him. Gary Jones, an Orange County sheriff, had been trying to get the goods on Cohen ever since he’d gotten a tip that Cohen was stealing luxury cars from owners who were behind on their payments. He then learned Cohen was also running a fake law firm out of the towing companies he used to steal the cars. The thief who stole them for Cohen turned against him — yet he still got off.

Then Jones heard about the Club. In July 1988 Cohen opened his own swingers club in a four-bedroom house cut up into crawl spaces and tunnels lined with mattresses. It was so successful that it became a neighborhood nuisance.

After the slew of complaints reached a crescendo, Jones arrived on the Club’s doorstep in 1989. Cohen was outraged and went on TV to plead for his free-speech rights. But then he telephoned Jones, pointedly mentioning the sheriff’s wife and children by name, and threatened to buy the deed to Jones’s house, “I came unglued,” Jones says. “He made it personal, so every time that guy sneezed, I knew.”

Jones finally charged him with zoning and fire-code violations, but the trial ended in a hung jury. Even before that, however, Cohen’s troubles had begun to mount: He was ordered out of Boydston’s house for

failure to pay the mortgage, was arrested for hitting one of his daughters and finally came under investigation for far more serious crimes than running a sex club. He’d flimflammed his way into a bankruptcy involving an elderly woman whose son had run up large debts. Cohen impersonated an attorney, created false documents and loans to hide what he’d done and then convinced his “client” to invest her hidden assets in his shrimp farm.

“They arrested him seven times,” says Boydston. Still, he was cocky and sure he’d never be convicted. When he learned one of the DA’s law clerks had failed her bar exam, he called and told her she’d passed, just to mess with her mind. Then Boydston went to the FBI with her evidence, and Cohen was on his way to federal prison for 46 months.

Once again, he married first. He met wife number four at the Club, where West Virginia-born Karon Poer was a member. Though she’d later say Cohen wore the same clothes for days, never brushed his teeth and was tight with money, she married him at a swingers convention in Las Vegas and moved into the house Cohen bought using Boydston’s money. Cohen promptly made Poer an officer of Ynata.

Poer soon came to agree with Cohen’s other ex-wives. “He never wanted to do anything legal,” she said. Cohen took tens of thousands of dollars in benefits she’d received on the death of a previous husband and invested it in his own name. As the law closed in on the bankruptcy fraud, Cohen’s father dropped dead. At the funeral his family told him to leave and stay away.

Cohen gave Poer the French Connection to run while he was inside. But when the BBS computers disappeared, allegedly stolen by his cronies, she also had enough and sued Cohen for divorce. Cohen countersued from prison, charging she’d stolen the French Connection from him. When he got out of jail in 1995, Cohen stalked her, Poer claimed, and flattened her tires.

When I reach her to ask about Cohen, Poer will say only, “You can kiss mah ass.”

Kremen spent a couple of years learning the ropes in Silicon Valley before he launched his first businesses in repackaging open-source, or free, software and then selling security programs for computers hooked up to the newborn Internet. He hardly had a personal life. “I dated a couple of girls, but I was working hard,” he says. “I wasn’t dysfunctional; I was just focused on other things.” He spent hours looking — mostly unsuccessfully — for dates in newspaper personals columns. And that led to an epiphany. “I wished there were a database you could sort through in order to find a person to marry. That’s the absolute stone-cold truth.” It didn’t exist, so he invented one.

In 1993, having noticed that more and more people had e-mail addresses, Kremen foresaw that classified advertising would eventually migrate to cyberspace, and he formed a company called Online Classifieds. He moved to San Francisco’s Haight district, hired a programmer and, in May 1994, shrewdly registered a batch of classifieds-style domain names — Jobs.com, Housing .com, Autos.com and Sex.com. Kremen also bought a defunct domain callcd Match .com for $2,500. He was going to start by selling romance. “I just have the vision,” he said. “Gonna raise venture capital.”

Kremen, then 32, raised $200,000, then another $2 million, then $7 million more. Two months after the launch of Match.com, when it claimed 7,000 members and a 10 percent weekly growth rate, he turned down an offer to merge with the company that became Excite.com. “I probably left $2 billion on the table there because of my ego,” he says. “I didn’t do it, because I wanted to be the CEO.” He had that title at Match.com.

Almost immediately, though, he was forced out by his investors, who didn’t think he was as good at managing businesses as he was at conceiving them. He stayed on long enough to see his stock vest and then left to develop an early form of ad- and spyware that he later sold to Microsoft for a stash of its stock. By the fall of 1995 Kremen was rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names in the Internet business when a friend discovered, just days after it happened, that the Sex.com domain had somehow been transferred to Cohen.

Released from custody in February 1995, Cohen was determined not only to regain his footing in the cybersex business but to move to a higher level. In prison he’d met and befriended Marshall Zolp, a convicted con man, securities fraudster and expert in offshore money laundering. “Zolp was his professor,” says Luke Ford, a blogger known as the Matt Drudge of porn. “He took Cohen to school.” Back on the street, Cohen applied his new knowledge to his old interests in sex and scams.

In the early 1990s sexual images were shared over the Internet with no profits at stake. Computer programmers scanned photos from magazines and uploaded them for tech-savvy nerds to download for free. With the release of Netscape, in 1994, everything changed. The web turned as lawless as the Wild West. Fledgling entrepreneurs snatched up corporate domain names from a company called Network Solutions, which was charged with registering all legal claims to this new digital territory. Ransom was often the idea. Others saw the future in commercial porn.

By 1998 adult websites accounted for almost 70 percent of the $1.4 billion spent on online content. In 2003, when the market had grown to more than $5 billion, pornography still made up almost 60 percent of the total. In 1995 high school dropout Seth Warshavsky started the Internet Entertainment Group, an adult site that reportedly grossed $20 million in 1997, the year he marketed the renowned Pamela and Tommy Lee video.

The next year he marketed the infamous nude photos of Dr. Laura Schlessinger. He is now reportedly living in Thailand, on the run from various creditors.

Ron Levi, owner of Cyberotica.com, possibly the biggest early innovator, is credited with inventing pay-per-click advertising revenue in 1996, which charged for productive clicks rather than raw clicks. In the first six years of operation Levi paid out $250 million to webmasters for his advertising — and he was still a very rich man.

None of this was wasted on Cohen, who had been given a desk at a company called Midcom, a placement service for technology professionals, many with top-secret government clearance. It was owned by Barbara Cepinko, a Good Samaritan who took a chance on Cohen and would soon regret her kindness.

In the fall of 1995 Cohen launched his greatest scam. First he contacted Network Solutions, the industry administrator of domain names, and then followed up with a forged letter purportedly written by the president of Kremen’s company Online Classifieds. The letter claimed that, despite its name, Online Classifieds had no Internet access and slated that Kremen, a mere employee, had been fired. The company was therefore relinquishing its ownership of Sex.com and giving Cohen the right to take it. Cohen then forged an e-mail that gave his phone number as the one to call to confirm the transfer. With this flimsy pretext Network Solutions handed the prize to the con man.

A few weeks later Cohen incorporated Sporting Houses Management and assigned the company the rights to the domain. A few months later when he offered shares to the public through a San Diego brokerage that specialized in so-called pump-and-dump penny stocks, Sporting Houses announced plans to build Wanaleiya, an X-rated Disneyland cum Club Med, a brothel resort boasting 500 on-site hookers, golf, tennis, skeet, a race track and its own airport on 300 acres, including a whorehouse called Sheri’s Ranch, outside Las Vegas. For $7,000 a weekend, clients would have all they could eat, drink, smoke and screw. But after the owner of Sheri’s told the press it was not for sale and Nevada announced it would investigate the scheme, Wanaleiya fizzled. Meanwhile one of the banks that financed Midcom cut off its credit because, unbeknownst to her, Cepinko was named in the offering as an officer of Sporting Houses.

Early in 1996 Cohen struck again. This time he transferred the license for Sex .com to a new company he’d set up in the British Virgin Islands. Sir William Douglas was named as its chairman according to corporate documents, but Douglas had nothing to do with it. The real William Douglas was the chief justice of the Barbados Supreme Court; years before he had refused to extradite England’s great train robber Ronald Biggs, who had been on the run for 16 years.

When Network Solutions brushed off Kremen’s complaints about his stolen domain, Kremen let the matter slide for a few months, unsure if he wanted to be identified with online porn. By then Cohen had put up what’s known as a banner farm at Sex.com — a page of banner ads for porn purveyors who paid Sex.com to send surfers their way. He also posted articles such as “Adventures in Anal Erotica,” by Stephen M. Cohen.

Finally furious that his domain was enriching Cohen, Kremen found a young lawyer who agreed, in 1998, to file suit against Cohen and Network Solutions. Kremen says the adversaries spoke for the first time when Cohen called him that spring, claiming to be an attorney with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and tried to scare Kremen off by saying he’d locked up the name.

In fact, Kremen couldn’t afford what he knew would be a huge legal undertaking, so it was a stroke of luck when Cohen started threatening some of the biggest names in online porn by filing infringement lawsuits against anyone using the word sex in a domain name. Kremen decided to find litigation partners who would pay for his lawyers in exchange for a share of any eventual winnings; he spammed the online porn world with e-mails seeking anyone who had been threatened by Cohen. Serge Birbrair, a Russian-born porn-traffic broker who bought clicks from small website operators and sold them in bulk to bigger ones via a domain called Sexia.com, had just been sued by Cohen.

“I knew the biggest sharks on the Internet,” says Birbrair, and he called the two biggest, Levi of Cybererotica .com and Warshavsky, who agreed to bankroll Kremen in exchange for 45 percent of Sex.com.

Kremen’s partnership of porn moguls soon fell apart. Warshavsky got in trouble with creditors and stopped paying his share of the legal bills. Levi then dropped out of the litigation too. But Kremen had found a new weapon: Charles Carreon, a burned-out Buddhist public defender with a ponytail. Carreon was smart, scrappy and well-spoken and considered himself a warrior in search of a just cause. He decided to portray Kremen as a woman-friendly good guy who had planned to turn Sex.com into an educational website and argued that the domain was a piece of property. If Carreon won the day, he would not only stop Network Solutions from disavowing its responsibility (the company claimed domain names were services like phone numbers, not property like a car), he might pave the way to Kremen recovering the profits Cohen had siphoned off.

In 1999 Carreon won a big round in Oregon, where he convinced a three-judge panel to stay all of Cohen’s trademark cases while he rewrote Kremen’s federal complaint. He resubmitted it almost four years to the day after Cohen had snatched Sex.com. The litigation kept the case alive, albeit on life support. Kremen had no money and had agreed to pay Carreon only if he won.

Meanwhile Cohen, who was making $750,000 a month from Sex.com and had almost no overhead, was revving up his lifestyle. By that time, Sex.com was making a fortune, so much that Cohen was able to hire one of the best-known trademark attorneys in the country, Leonard Duboff, a disgraced academic with a shady past. (Duboff declined to talk to playboy, calling questions about his past insulting.) Cohen also bought the mansion in Rancho Santa Fe and started moving his Sex.com proceeds offshore. He changed the name of his British Virgin Islands corporation to Ynata, began building a network that illegally sent microwave signals across the Mex-ico-California border and issued a press release claiming that he was taking over Caesars Palace.

Depressed, Kremen began taking crystal mcth, which turned out to be his drug of choice. He’d begun, like “a lot of software guys,” with caffeine, then moved on to cocaine, he says. “But you can’t program on coke because it makes you too jittery.” Then someone gave him his first hit of speed. “I didn’t touch drugs until I was 35,” he says, “when someone said, ‘Take this and you can stay up all night and have fun.’” Fun was not going to clubs and meeting good-looking women, though. It was sitting at the computer for three days straight. “Which is kind of pathetic, if you think about it,” Kremen says. “Speed is a coder’s drug.”

He also began having affairs with “women who thought I was a little Internet star,” he says. “I had no time for the long chase after good-looking women, but I wouldn’t throw away low-hanging fruit.” One catch was Ana Belinda, Carreon’s doe-eyed 19-year-old daughter, who’d come to San Francisco to help with the lawsuit.

Over the next year the case began to turn slowly in Kremen’s favor. When Cohen countersued for defamation, Carreon, a former insurance lawyer, had another brainstorm. If Kremen had homeowners insurance, his carrier, State Farm, would be obliged to defend him. Kremen did, State Farm agreed, and suddenly there were far more powerful lawyers and investigators in the fray, taking depositions and serving subpoenas to sniff out Cohen’s assets, perforating the corporate shells that had always protected him and analyzing how he moved his money around. “It was going to Liechtenstein in $100,000 chunks,” Carreon says.

Luckily for Kremen, some of his early investments began paying off at that point and he decided to, as he puts it, “liquidate the dot-com stock I had and put it all on red to beat this guy.” When Judge James Ware, who was hearing the federal case in San Jose, granted a motion dismissing the suit against Network Solutions, Kremen q hired Jim Wagstaffe, a noted appellate attorney, to mount an appeal. Wagstaffe had a crucial advantage: Unlike Carreon, he looked like the kind of lawyer a federal 4 judge might take seriously, and he could balance out Kremen, who admits he was, at the time, in his “drug-addled state.”

“Courts don’t traditionally respond well to eccentricity,” says Wagstaffe. “Gary was perceived as wacky, and the con man was seen as a businessman surrounded by men in suits. Plus he’s got Network Solutions on his side. You’re a judge. Who do you think is crazy?”

Kremen’s team knew where Cohen had hidden his money, but it wanted to keep Network Solutions in the case; it was the proverbial pot of gold. Wagstaffe proposed narrowing Kremen’s argument to a single issue that would give them a wedge to reopen the case against Network Solutions. So they did. In mid-2000 Wagstaffe replaced Carreon as the lead attorney and asked the court to issue a summary judgment declaring Cohen’s claim to Sex .com invalid because the letter Cohen had used to take it was an obvious forgery that couldn’t be authenticated and thus could not be introduced as evidence.

Cohen’s deposition, which followed that motion, was a revelation to Kremen. “I’m sitting there listening to this guy, and I knew about the criminal record,” Kremen says. As Cohen went on and on, Kremen realized “this guy’s a complete, total bullshitter. It’s all made up, and if I can just stay the course, he’s gonna lose. I’m gonna beat him. And then he panics.”

Cohen had fought like a legal demon to keep Kremen’s side from seeing certain of his bank records. When they were finally produced, in October 2000, he made his biggest mistake. He waltzed into the Kinko’s where they were being copied, claimed to be one of Kremen’s lawyers and, demonstrating the audacity that had brought him so far, walked out with them. When the documents finally appeared a few days later, 113 pages were missing. So Kremen’s lawyers asked if the Kinko’s had security cameras. Sure enough it did, and the tapes showed Cohen absconding with the records.

“You’d think he’d at least wear a hat or something,” Kremen says.

“That was it,” says Cohen’s lawyer Robert Dorband, who worked for Duboff. “I pretty much threw up my hands and said, ‘We’re in damage control.’”

Wagstaffe immediately made a second motion asking Ware to restrain Cohen from disposing of any of the assets they’d uncovered and ordering him to repatriate $25 million they could already prove had been sent offshore. A few days later Ware granted both of Kremen’s motions effective immediately.

On that victorious morning of November 27, 2000 Cohen was not in court. Kremen says that while he went into a courthouse bathroom to snort some celebratory coke, 138 the bad guy worked the phones and managed to send another $1.3 million out of the country before he hightailed it to Tijuana. A few months later a trial to determine damages was held in Cohen’s absence. When his lawyer claimed Cohen had failed to appear because he’d been put in jail in Mexico for trying to bring some of his ill-gotten gains back to America, Ware was outraged and issued an arrest order, citing Cohen for civil contempt. As a fugitive Cohen lost his right to present a defense. A month later Ware ruled that Cohen owed Kremen $65 million.

In the years since, as he appealed Ware’s rulings from Mexico, even taking his case to the U.S. Supreme Court and always sticking to his story that he’d been thrown into a Mexican jail for trying to repay Kremen, Cohen again resorted to playing lawyer, representing himself. And true to form, when the court finally seized his only significant asset in America, the Rancho Santa Fe mansion, Cohen filed a phony bankruptcy to disrupt the process; when that failed he had his lackeys vandalize the place. On September 10, 2001 a furious Ware ordered that the house be restored within a week. Seven days later Kremen moved in.

“I bought a building in San Francisco and had all these people doing heroin, squatting with me. Eventually it comes to my dull mind that I gotta clean this up.”

Alas, the Internet porn boom was over by then, and the dot-com bubble had burst. Though Kremen made $500,000 in each of the first few months he owned Sex.com, the revenue soon plunged. For a moment Cohen, who had founded Earthstation 5, a peer-to-peer file-trading network (a la Napster and Kazaa), seemed more prescient than Kremen, but the network was exposed as a fraud in The Washington Post and the geek community turned against it.

Depressed because he’d won so little so far and would have to fight like crazy to get anything else, more than a little boggled by his turn from litigant to porno clickmeister and still fielding regular taunting phone calls from Cohen, Kremen went a little crazy too. He offered a reward for Cohen’s capture but withdrew it after Cohen claimed it led to a shoot-out with bounty hunters in Tijuana.

Kremen’s lifestyle backslid then as well. “He had to date the porn star, you know?” says Margo Evashevski, his private investigator, speaking of Wilde, who ever so briefly passed through Kremen’s bed. “I did some dabbling and tasting in the world of porn,” Kremen says. “I went to that zone, checked out the dark side, had a litde fun and came back to the business side.” His drugging escalated again, and a year later his parents induced his sister to move in with him. She redecorated the mansion, and he kicked his drug addiction and got on an even keel.

“My customers are websites,” Kremen says, settling in front of one of his computers to give a lesson in online porn. Porn purveyors can log on to Sex.com and see what it costs to get a porn consumer’s attention: 18 cents for the home page, 3 cents “for the top listing on the pee page,” Kremen says. If people ask for child porn, Sex .corn’s software sends them to an anti-kiddie porn website. “No one says it’s pretty,” Kremen says, surfing to WiredPussy.com. “Water bondage? What the fuck! I don’t even know what that is.”

In January 2001 Kremen started his new life with a Fear and Loathing-like road trip with his lawyer to a Vegas online-porn trade show where he ate naked sushi and first encountered Cohen’s world. “I had fun,” he says, “but in a voyeuristic, out-of-my-league way.”

“Gary had zero friends,” says Carreon. “The next day he was God.”

For a moment he lost his mind again. “I bought a building in San Francisco and had all these people doing heroin, squatting with me,” Kremen says. One of them, a carpenter, offered to build a dungeon in the basement, and Kremen agreed. “I never got to use it,” he says sheepishly. “Not my style. Some other people did, though. Eventually it comes to my dull mind that I gotta clean this up. So I spend the next two years cleaning up.”

By then Kremen had learned enough to think he might indeed have a case against Network Solutions. After an appeals court reinstated that suit in 2003, he did some math, realized he might be able to win $120 million and decided to pursue it. The defendant must have realized it too, since the company (which has been sold several times and has few connections to what it was in 1995) settled in exchange for a confidentiality agreement and a sum, a knowledgeable source says, in the neighborhood of $15 million.

Kremen began to feel he was free from his own form of bondage. He actually laughed when Cohen called to offer him a share of Earthstation 5 in lieu of the $65 million he owed him (which with interest has now risen to $82 million). Kremen’s learned to laugh at himself, too. Asked if he’s come to love litigation — he sues so frequently now it seems like a hobby — he replies, “They don’t teach you about the use of law at Stanford business school.”

Kremen moved full-time to Rancho Santa Fe, where he didn’t know any drug addicts, and he came up with the idea that Sex .com would henceforth sell dirty searches to squeaky-clean search engines. “You type in, like, ‘lesbians,’ and it’s really our listing,” he says. “We’re doing a revenue share. I want a sustainable business that, at the end of the day, someone will buy. This is about ad sales. This has nothing to do with porn.”

With perfect timing, Kym Wilde serves lunch as he says this. She keeps her clothes on this time.

Last year Kremen turned his attention to Cohen’s hidden assets, and by the fall his latest push against the bad guy began to bear fruit. In San Jose Judge Ware issued a series of orders that let Kremen seize not just the U.S.-based hard assets Cohen had put in the names of his fifth ex-wife and several straw men, but even his mail, or at least whatever of it was directed to the postal drops Kremen’s team had managed to identify. His people also seized several computers that showed, among other things, that Cohen had hacked into Kremen’s voice mail more than 300 dmes.

Kremen’s lawyers subpoenaed and froze the bank accounts, domain names, e-mail accounts and credit cards of everyone close to Cohen, paralyzing their lives. A similar effort was under way in Mexico.

Still Cohen appeared to be no less powerful on the lam. His ISP sent bandwidth by microwaves from the U.S. to Mexico and provided Internet connectivity to, among other customers, the U.S. consulate and government buildings in Tijuana.

The pressure on Cohen’s associates worked, though. Just after Kremen sued them all to recover those assets, his fifth wife Rosa’s daughter Jhuliana was arrested while driving through a special easy-clearance lane at the border near TJ with 200-plus pounds of marijuana in her car. She was served with Kremen’s suit while she was in jail. Her mother was served at Jhuliana’s arraignment. Former drug dealer Jack Brownfield, who’d remained a friend and Cohen frontman, had begun negotiations on behalf of himself, Rosa and Jhuliana to give Kremen title to Cohen’s Mexican shrimp farm, his TJ strip club, his ISP and more.

At the end of October the hunt was still on when Kremen got a lucky break. A top officer with the U.S. Marshals Service’s Mexican cross-border unit had been following the case and trading information with Kremen’s team; even though civil contempt warrants aren’t a priority, someone in the government had at last taken an interest in Cohen. When one of Kremen’s lawyers told the marshal something he didn’t know, that Cohen had divorced Rosa, the marshal quietly took action.

Post-divorce, Cohen had fewer legal rights in Mexico and needed a different kind of visa to remain in TJ. Though he could have paid a lawyer $ 100 to get it for him, he characteristically chose to save the money and do it himself. When he arrived at the local immigration office for his appointment on October 27, Mexican officials arrested him and turned him over to agents of the U.S. Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs

Enforcement and the marshals, who walked him across the border at 2:45 that afternoon and locked him up in the same San Diego jail as his stepdaughter.

The next day, dressed in a green prison jumpsuit, Cohen was arraigned in a wood-paneled courtroom. With a “very amused, smug, shitty-ass, you-think-you-got-me grin,” says Evashevski, who was there with Kremen’s sister, Cohen surveyed the crowd, “staring us down, looking for Gary,” who, to his obvious disappointment, was in Illinois visiting his parents.

The next step would have been a hearing 10 days later, when the government would have had to prove its man was in fact Cohen. But over the objections of the judge and oblivious to the rolling eyes of his public defender, Cohen confirmed his identity, claimed poverty and asked for a court-appointed lawyer. Then, incredibly, the con man added that since he already had another lawyer trying to settle with Kremen, he wanted to be released on bail to facilitate their talks. The judge refused and ordered Cohen’s transfer to San Jose, where he would face a choice: Repatriate $25 million of the money he’d moved offshore before 2001 or, as Kremen’s attorney Tim Dillon puts it, “rot in jail.”

But no one was ready to declare victory yet. “Cohen never stops working you, ever,” says Wagstaffe. “He thinks if he keeps talking, eventually you’ll be persuaded. Gary’s a worrier, and Cohen plays on Gary’s insecurities.” And as Wagstaffe admits, “when Kremen dies, Cohen’s name will be in his obituary. They are linked for the ages.”

Kremen is well aware of this. Indeed, within hours of Cohen’s arrest, Kremen said he fully expected to pick up a ringing phone and find Cohen on the other end, calling from prison just to fuck with him. In Mexico Kremen’s team has uncovered about $5 million in real property in addition to the ISP, which it thinks is a $1 million business. Millions more are hidden in Europe, the Caribbean and Vanuatu, and Kremen hopes to get some, if not all, of it. “I tell him it’s going to happen with or without lube, so lie down and get it over with,” says Kremen. “I don’t think we’ll see $82 million, but a couple million’s better than a sharp stick in the eye. Don’t you agree?”

Still, Kremen’s not ready for his 11-year war with Cohen to end. “Clearly,” he says, “this story is not over.” I can’t help but think I hear relish, not dread, in his voice.

THE FIRST SIGN THAT CALVIN KLEIN HAD ARRIVED was the pair of bulky men moving down the escalator onto the main floor of Saks Fifth Avenue. Guns bulged under their blazers as they eyed the lunchtime crowd-about 400 people who’d come to see the fashion designer at his first public appearance since he’d spent the month of May in the Hazelden Rehabilitation Program, a Minnesota drug-and-alcohol clinic. Klein’s partner, Barry K. Schwartz, and dozens of employees of Calvin Klein Industries milled nervously around a gray marble platform on which brushed-steel letters spelled out ETERNITY, the name of the perfume Klein had come to introduce.

He rode down the escalator moments later, dressed in a tan bespoke suit, red tie, and penny loafers. Though pink from the sun, Klein’s face was drawn. He spoke briefly (“I hope I get a chance to meet all of you”), then stepped behind a drafting table, picked up a pen, and began signing autographs.

Behind a rope, fourteen reporters strained to hear what he said to his fans. Though they’d been told no questions would be answered, some shouted them anyway, asking about his problems with vodka and Valium. Finally, Klein turned. “I feel fine,” he said. “Good. Just really good.” Then he put his hand up beside his head like Ronald Reagan does when he’s ignoring Sam Donaldson. “I have a problem with my ear,” he said, returning to his autographs.

The Saks and Klein people wanted only to talk about how well Eternity was selling, so the reporters quickly got bored. “Why are we here?” Newsday asked.

Forty minutes later, as the fans thinned out, Marilyn Berkery, a UPI reporter, joined the line of autograph seekers, still hoping to get in a question. As she reached Klein, his P.R. man, Paul Wilmot, blocked her way, but Berkery pushed past and approached the designer. “I’m just here for signing,” he said, looking befuddled.

“What about the new morality?” Berkery pressed.

“I’d need a press conference to do that one,” Klein said.

“In and out fast,” said Wilmot, stepping in to lead Klein away.

“In and out,” Klein repeated, smiling thinly as he left.

* * *

THAT JUNE MONDAY, AS HIS LABEL PASSED ITS twentieth anniversary, Calvin Klein embarked on the latest leg of an extraordinary odyssey-a sort of one-man pilgrimage through the social history of modern America. In his journey from P.S. 80 on Mosholu Parkway in the Bronx to a summer place on Georgica Pond in East Hampton, Klein, 45, has ridden America’s bucking Zeitgeist with remarkable skill, using his instinct for sensing-and reflecting-new mores to sell products from shoes to shampoo. While almost every other successful designer has found a style and stuck to it, Klein has built a billion-dollar business in his own evolving image. When he started his label, in the anti-fashion sixties, he wore long hair and publicly disdained his craft. “What can be great about designing fashion?” he asked in 1969. “Being a doctor, now, that’s great.” He lived in a rent-controlled Forest Hills apartment with the teenage sweetheart he’d married and their baby daughter. And he designed clothes-Trevira blouses, polyester print dresses-for people who shared his unsophisticated taste.

But within a few years, he had pronounced polyester “slimy,” moved to the Upper East Side, and started wearing Yves Saint Laurent suits.. He still designed simple careerwear but now with better fabrics.

Then, in the late seventies, Klein emerged from the cocoon of middle-class propriety and began testing his wings. He shed his wife and changed the package that his most important product-Calvin Klein-came in. Gone were his wide ties and flared pants, traded in for Levis, T-shirts, and exercisewear. He still worked long days, but now he danced his nights away in drug-soaked discos with a new pack of fast-lane celebrity friends. He threw parties in his sleek, new bachelor apartment with its black-leather-covered bed; made the scene with models, both male and female; and vacationed in Key West and Fire Island Pines. The clothes he designed reflected the times: He set styles for gay men, his women’s clothes grew still more expensive and elegant, and his status jeans served a growing fashion fascination among the masses.

In the eighties, with Reagan occupying the White House, a new Gilded Age descending on the country, and AIDS ravaging the gay community, Klein could be found dressed in charcoal suits and white shirts, hanging out either with a new, preppy girlfriend, his design assistant Kelly Rector, or with the decade’s new heroes, freshly minted corporate raiders and highyield-junk-bond traders. He was still selling himself-appearing in his own ads-and still trading in sex in promotions for a perfume and androgynous underwear. But his sex-in-advertising had become newly ambivalent.

As the decade progressed, Klein reinvented himself yet again. He married Rector, now 31, and-inspired by a word written inside a ring he’d bought her from the duchess of Windsor’s collection-conceived his new scent, Eternity. At his shows, old friends like Bianca Jagger and Steve Rubell now rubbed shoulders with new ones like Gayfryd Steinberg and Jerry Zipkin, as models paraded past in extravagant evening clothes that were a far cry from his signature sportswear.

Now comes the Eternity promotion campaign. In September, when the fragrance is nationally released, Klein will saturate the airwaves and periodicals with a reported $5.3 million worth of ads-ten-page photographic portfolios and ten 30second TV spots-selling, Klein told Women’s Wear Daily last month, “spirituality … love … marriage … commitment. I think that is a feeling that is happening all across the country.”

* * *

THOUGH PEOPLE WHO KNOW HIM ARE SYMPATHETIC about his problems with drugs and alcohol, some of them are cynical about this latest turn in the Calvin Klein journey. They claim Klein and Schwartz are positioning their company to sell it or expand it with other people’s money. In either case, they argue, Klein still has to establish that he’s in good health and condition to lead the company into the future. “It’s all about publicity,” says a fellow designer. Even Robin Burns, the president of Calvin Klein Cosmetics, acknowledges that Klein’s admission of his drug problems might help sales. “Calvin once told me there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

“He’s the consummate P.R. guy,” says Stanley Kohlenberg, who was the first president of Calvin Klein Cosmetics and now runs Sanofi Beauty Products. “It’s harder to create an image than a fall look. He created an image. He was everyone’s fantasy of style, sophistication, and creativity. It was the life-style of the times. You could be any sex you wanted. The more outrageous you were, the better. He pushed the edge of the envelope. He had the drive, intelligence, and creativity to make a dreamworld come true.”

Though Klein continues to use himself and his realized “dreamworld” to sell his products, he refused to be interviewed for this article. ” `My Story,’ by Calvin Klein-that’s the only thing to be done,” said Wilmot, the P.R. man. But neither the designer’s official story nor the rumors that endure in the absence of a fleshed-out portrait do justice to the tale of his rise, fall, and recent revival. Interviews with more than 50 people, including current and former employees, close friends of Klein and his two wives, and retailers and financiers involved in his ventures, consistently paint a portrait of a contradictory man whose outsize life has caused him personal and professional problems.

“He used to be a sweetheart,” says an ex-employee who worked close to Klein for years. “He used to be able to separate his private life from his business life.” But then? “There were so many changes.”

“He knew he had to pay the piper for his celebrity,” another friend says sadly. “But he’s been paying all along.”

* * *

THE FIRST MAJOR ARTICLE TO FEATURE CALVIN Klein appeared in the New York Times in 1969 under the headline-ironic in retrospect — FASHION DESIGNERS WHO SHUN THE FASHION SCENE. The outlines of his story, first told in that piece, are now well known. He was raised in the Bronx, the son of a Harlem grocer and a mother who liked nice clothes. Klein would join her on forays to Loehmann’s, where he’d study marked-down Norman Norell designs. He attended the High School of Industrial Art and the Fashion Institute of Technology, graduating at twenty in 1962 and going to work as a $75-a-week sketch artist for the late Dan Millstein, an oldline cloak-and-suit manufacturer. Klein worked there two years, leaving when Millstein refused him a $25-a-week raise. “Biggest mistake Dan made in his life,” says Edward Millstein, his brother and co-owner of the firm. “We wanted to keep him but he was very ambitious.”

Today, Alan G. Millstein, Dan Millstein’s nephew and publisher of the Fashion Network Report, recalls that in 1964, his uncle lent Klein $400 so he could honeymoon in the Catskills with his bride, Jayne Centre, a textile designer who’d also been raised in the Bronx and attended P.S. 80 and F.I.T. “Jayne’s father was very concerned” about Klein’s income, recalls Jeffrey Banks, an ex-assistant.

Over the next few years, Klein had several jobs, including a stint as a copyboy at Women’s Wear Daily. In 1968, he borrowed $10,000 from his boyhood pal Barry K. Schwartz (who had inherited a Harlem grocery from his father) and set up Calvin Klein, Ltd., a cloak-and-suit firm. Soon after, during the riots following Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, Schwartz’s store was looted, and he joined Klein as an equal partner.

They had some quick successes: The story of Klein’s rolling a cart of coats uptown to win his first $50,000 order from Mildred Custin, president of Bonwit Teller, is a garment-center legend. Meanwhile, he, Jayne, and their daughter, Marci, who had been born in 1966, lived in Queens in three and a half rooms decorated with pink silk chairs, a green couch, a handme-down chest, and some Picasso lithographs. Klein drove a Plymouth to work at his tiny office in a suite in the York Hotel. He and Schwartz “worked like slaves,” says an early employee. The effort paid off in 1973, when Klein won the first of his three Coty awards. By then he had expanded his line from coats to a 74-piece collection of clothes for women, and the award cited his “nonconformist” but “classic” styles.

The marriage, however, was troubled. “They were so young,” says Gina Epworth, his first P.R. woman. “Calvin grew up so fast. They grew at different paces. She pushed him hard. If he got to the office at 8:20, she called at 8:22. The marriage started going bad because she couldn’t bear to not always know where he was. The first time he went to Europe, she called half a million times. He used to say nobody should be married. She was very unhappy. I don’t think he blamed her. I think he realized something was wrong with him.” Klein himself hinted at what had happened in a 1984 Playboy interview: “If you have to go somewhere else for sex, then why be married?”

Epworth’s husband, a lawyer, represented Klein in the divorce, which took effect in 1974. “It was the best divorce in history,” says someone who knows both parties. “He was incredibly generous with her. He bought her an apartment and several cars. It was all to do with his daughter.” (Klein is said to be devoted to Marci, who graduated in May from Brown. When she was kidnapped, in 1978, he paid $100,000 ransom and personally rescued her. Three kidnappers, including a former Klein baby-sitter, were later captured and convicted.)

After the first Coty, Klein cut back from more than 1,000 outlets to 250, at the same time upgrading his fabrics and his image. “I remember him understanding that something was marketable besides the clothing,” says an early Klein assistant. “There was something going on besides design and shipping.”

As the seventies progressed, Klein spread his wings. Before their divorce, the Kleins had moved to the East Side, and there Klein met a boyhood hero, designer Chester Weinberg. After his divorce, Klein dated several women, but he also often went dancing in gay discos like Le Jardin, 12 West, and Flamingo and shared a house with another designer, Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, in the predominantly gay community Fire Island Pines. Weinberg and di Sant’Angelo introduced him to the sophisticated, anything-goes fashion world, teaching him “about society, about travel, about the world,” a friend says. “Calvin was growing and learning, freeing himself finally.”

Klein also changed his looks-so dramatically that many people wondered whether he had had plastic surgery. He has denied this, and some acquaintances say he simply started working out and treating acne scars with silicone injections. Fashion photographer Richie Williamson recalls meeting Klein in Fire Island Pines in the old days. “I’ve never seen such a transformation in my life,” he says. “One year he was bland Calvin. The next year, he looked incredible.”

Still, Klein was overshadowed-both by day, in the fashion world, and at night, in clubs like Hurrah and Studio 54-by Halston, a designer who was about ten years older. “Calvin was jealous of Halston,” says an acquaintance. “Halston created an aura, a mystique. What Halston had, Calvin wanted.”

The mystique that Klein then created for himself was in large part sexual. Speculation about his preferences started in those days-and Klein didn’t discourage it with his behavior. Over the years, he was often seen in gay hangouts like Rounds and Private Eyes. But he was just as often seen with beautiful women as with men.

One artist who spent many hours in Studio 54 in the late seventies, before owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager were arrested for skimming proceeds, says he came to know Klein well. The artist says that Klein, along with Halston and a fast-track pack of bi-coastal fashion- and entertainment-world bachelors, would stand near the club’s bar dispensing free drinks. “They referred to themselves as the inner circle,” the artist says.

Klein has never commented publicly on his sexual preference. But in Playboy, when talking about “a very wild period” he went through, he said, “I’ve fooled around a lot. I stopped at nothing. I would do anything” (his emphasis).

He has also denied that he was heavily involved with drugs in the seventies. But acquaintances say he ran with a crowd that took Quaaludes and snorted cocaine to stay up.

* * *

KLEIN’S EMPIRE, MEANWHILE, WAS EXPANDING with his fame. Beginning in the late seventies, he and Ralph Lauren, another Bronx-born designer, took Halston’s celebrity-designer stance and raised it to an art form. Their careers ran parallel (though family man Lauren was and is more private) and their rivalry has always been intense. They used similar advertising shots by photographer Bruce Weber. Klein hired his first contract model, Jose Borain, away from Lauren. Kelly Rector, too, came to Klein’s employ from Lauren’s studio.

Stanley Kohlenberg was at the center of an early struggle between the two fashion titans. He met Klein through his wife, who was a nurse for a doctor who treated the designer. Klein had decided he wanted to compete in the cosmetics-and-fragrance arena, and Kohlenberg-then an executive vicepresident of Revlon-went to work for him early in 1977.

Lauren had signed a fragrance license about six months before, and Klein and Schwartz wanted their products out no later than his. To find out what perfumes Klein liked, Kohlenberg says, “I bought every fragrance in the United States, masked them, and sprayed him with three a day. He hated everything except musk.” So Kohlenberg asked a fragrance house, International Flavors and Fragrances OFF), to develop a scent. Klein’s advisers rejected it, though, and IFF got Kohlenberg’s okay to offer the reject to Lauren. (A spokesman for IFF wouldn’t comment.)

A Klein aide finally found a fragrance in Paris that the designer liked. Meanwhile, both Klein and Lauren were negotiating with department stores that wanted to introduce their lines. Bloomingdale’s had set a date in early 1978 for Lauren and offered Klein a launch a week later. “Calvin couldn’t break after Ralph,” Kohlenberg says, “so we went to Saks.” But the fragrance Klein had chosen didn’t sell well, Kohlenberg says. “A week later, Barry called me screaming-his usual tone of voice.” Lauren’s fragrance was outselling Klein’s.

“Have you smelled it?” Kohlenberg asked Schwartz.

Five minutes later, Schwartz called back, screaming, “This is our fragrance!”

“We turned it down,” Kohlenberg reminded him. Looking back now, he laughs. “It was downnill from there.”

“Schwartz, with his Midas touch, was used to seeing money being made,” says another ex-employee. “I think he got impatient. He didn’t want to be bothered.” In November 1979, he ordered Kohlenberg to close the cosmetics company, fire his staff, and even cancel the airplane tickets of salesmen who were on the road. Frank A. Shields, the head of sales, had a contract, but when he took a few days off at Christmas, Schwartz fired him too. (He later sued and collected on his contract.) In an interview with Fortune, Shields recalled having lunch with his fifteen-year-old daughter, Brooke, and telling her that he was suing the Klein company. Later during the meal, he asked her what she was doing the next day. “I wish you hadn’t asked that, Daddy,” Brooke Shields replied. “I’m shooting six 30-second TV shots for Calvin Klein. He makes the only designer jeans I like.”

* * *

THE CLOSING OF THE COSMETICS COMPANY WAS SERIOUS, but the growth of Klein’s business had been impressive nonetheless. By 1978, Klein was offering hundreds of designs each season. Though not known for innovation, he helped define what came to be known as “the American look.” Typically, that meant understatement and a complete absence of gimmickry. He has used luxurious fabrics-cashmere, suede. fine wool, tissue-thin linen, and crepe de Chine in subtle colors, for example-but always in an easy, sexy, elegant, and modern manner. Though best known for daytime clothes, he is a master of the little black cocktail dress. And at the other end of the fashion spectrum, his jeans and associated low-priced styles have consistently struck chords with the buying public.

Much of the responsibility for Klein’s recent appeal rests with Bruce Weber, who, with his revolving team of hairdressers and stylists, creates Klein’s print advertising. The ads set a mood that frames Klein’s styles. Sometimes the mood has been even more important than the clothes. In one 1984 ad campaign, for example, the clothes virtually disappeared, replaced by ladders, bleached longhorn skulls, and Klein himself, stretched out languorously on a bed or leaning against a fireplace in Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.

Over the years, the company’s volume rose regularly. In its first year, wholesale revenues were $500,000. Klein claimed that his wholesale volume rose $1 million a year through the early seventies. By 1977, those annual revenues had leaped to $30 million, and he had licenses for scarves, shoes, belts, furs, sunglasses, and sheets; Klein and Schwartz were making $4million each. After the company signed licenses for cosmetics, jeans, and men’s wear, a 1978 Newsweek cover story put Klein’s annual retail volume at $100 million. The jeans alone were a gold mine. Klein claimed sales of 200,000 pairs the first week they were on the market, in 1978. By 1981, Fortune magazine figured Klein’s annual income at $8.5 million a year.

The stunning growth continued through the early eighties. The licensing program, which brought in $24,000 when it was initiated in 1974, had royalty income of $7.3 million ten years later. That year, worldwide retail sales were estimated at more than $600 million. Klein’s clothes were sold through 12,000 stores in the United States and were available in six other countries. His annual income passed $12,000,000.

His studio kept pumping out successful new products. In 1983, WWD declared his men’s-style underwear for women the hottest look since the bikini brief. A year later, he sold the division that made them to Kayser-Roth Corporation for $8.3million in cash and future payments valued at $2.9 million in 1984 dollars. In 1985, Calvin Klein Cosmetics, which had been sold to Minnetonka Industries, a personal-products company, the year after Schwartz closed it, catapulted his name to the top of the fragrance market-and filled his pockets with more royalty income-with a stunning success, Obsession.

* * *

BUT AS KLEIN’S RETAIL VOLUME CLIMBED, SO DID THE volume of ugly rumors about him, despite his nickname, Calvin Clean. “People in stores would ask me all the time if he was dying of AIDS,” recalls a former salesman for Klein’s jeans company. Klein has repeatedly denied the AIDS rumor. The source of it isn’t clear. Klein has said he thinks it began in 1982, when he entered Lenox Hill Hospital with viral meningitis. He’s also suggested that he was confused with Carl Rosen, the owner of Puritan Fashions, Klein’s jeans licensee, who died of cancer in August 1983. In any case, Klein was troubled by the talk.

In November 1983, armed with $75 million in loans from Manufacturers Hanover and Chemical banks, Klein and Schwartz threatened a hostile bid for Puritan. After the death of Carl Rosen, his 27-year-old son, Andrew, had been appointed the company’s president. As jeans sales declined generally, Puritan’s profits started to slide and the company began discounting Klein’s jeans. “You can’t sell $140 perfume and have your jeans at K mart,” explains Joel “Corky” Newman, who later became president of Calvin Klein Industries. By the beginning of 1984, Klein and Schwartz had completed a $105million leveraged buy-out of Puritan. (They then renamed the consolidated companies Calvin Klein Industries.)

At about the same time, Kelly Rector’s name began to be linked romantically with Klein’s. Klein had never encouraged anyone to take previous “dates” like Brooke Shields and Lisa Taylor seriously, but Rector was different. Klein told Playboy he adored her. “It’s nice to combine sex with love,” he said.

* * *

BORN IN DETROIT IN 1957, SHE GREW UP IN Westport, Connecticut, the child of a broken home. Kelly’s mother, Gloria List, who owns a folk- and Indian-art gallery in California, and her father, Tully Rector, a onetime TV-commercial director and horseman, have both been married and divorced more than once, according to a friend of the family. Rector’s parents both declined to comment.

Her first serious romance was with Sam Edelman, who made Ralph Lauren shoes under a license and whose family once owned Fleming Joffe, the alligator-, crocodile-, and lizard-skin company. “I remember the night Ralph offered her a job,” he says. “It was at the opening of a Saks boutique. She’d just graduated from F.LT.” She went to work in Lauren’s design studio in 1979. “Kelly had very Ralph Lauren style,” a Lauren employee says. “Clean, fresh, kind of preppy. In this business, when you see someone with style, you say, `Gee, work for me.’ ” At the studio, though, the co-worker says, Rector didn’t make major contributions: “She was looking for a life, someone to take care of her. She didn’t seem to be a career girl.”

Rector’s next boyfriend, Christopher Maytag, great-grandson of the founder of the home-appliance company, died in March 1987 of chronic intravenous-narcotics use (he had been found semi-conscious in a Lower East Side hallway). Rector also dated Cary Leeds, a Yale student and professional tennis player who is the son of Laurence Leeds, until recently the chief of Manhattan Industries, the company that makes Perry Ellis fashions. After Leeds, she went out with John Leffler, a successful musician who works in advertising. While they were dating, Rector got a new job assisting Calvin Klein.

“She was unhappy at Ralph and wanted to change jobs,” says a key employee of Klein’s at the time. Klein’s first impression wasn’t overwhelming. “The last thing I need is another pretty face with an opinion,” he told the employee after meeting Rector. But a studio slot stayed open, and early in 1981, she was chosen to fill it.

* * *

AT FIRST, RECTOR WAS KNOWN AS “THE SKIN GIRL.” Klein would hold fabric against her wrist to test color. “Then, all of a sudden, she had influence,” says a colleague. Studio gossip had it that Warren Beatty was indirectly responsible for her ascension. “They met at a party,” a friend of Kelly’s says. “Beatty invited her to L.A. She flew out for the weekend. I don’t think sparks flew.” They did, though, when Klein learned where Rector had been. “He was jealous,” recalls a former assistant. “In the end, he wanted her for himself.”

Eventually, Rector was given the title of design director. “I saw her as a cross between morale-booster and buffer,” says a designer who reported to her then. “She was the regent. She’d make jokes. She’d get information.”

She and Klein appeared to be lovers. “When she spent the night, we knew,” says the designer. “She’d come in in the same clothes. It was like a press release, in a funny way.”

The relationship was much discussed in the studio. “A day at Calvin Klein without rumors was like a day, without sunshine,” laughs one ex-employee. And Rector’s promotion caused jealousy. “We all had a crush on Calvin,” another ex-employee says.

“No human being ever treated me like Calvin did,” says one woman. “He believed in me. He stimulated me. He taught me. He still has me. Even today, when I hang up from talking to him, I’m high. He could call me in the middle of the night and say `I need you’ and I’d drop everything. It frightens me. I’d do anything for him.”

One male former assistant describes “a feeling of supernatural power” emanating from Klein. “He’s extremely seductive and sexy, and he knows it and he uses it. You feel like a little lamb in his lair.”

Klein has a record of generosity toward favored friends and employees. He paid rent and, later, funeral expenses for one of his early mentors, Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, an aristocratic former Vogue editor, one early employee says. After Weinberg’s fashion house failed, Klein hired him in 1978 as a consultant and later as design director for Calvin Klein jeans. Then, when Weinberg grew too ill with AIDS to work, Klein kept him on half-salary. Klein’s unpublicized largess was also extended to Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, who recuperated from surgery last year in a house Klein had rented in Palm Beach.

On the other hand, some Klein employees left abruptlyand not always happily. Frances Stein, for example, who’d become a top aide in 1976, left suddenly a few years later. In 1985, Klein’s longtime personal assistant-known among the staff as the English nanny-“was thrown away like a used Kleenex” after taking a leave of absence to attend to personal problems, says one of her friends.

Through Stein’s era and after, primary design responsibility was in the hands of Zack Carr, who’d arrived in 1975. Carr “was Calvin Klein,” an ex-employee says. But Carr left in 1984, at about the time that Rector was promoted to design director.

In the mid-eighties, Klein had two sensational sex-and-advertising-driven successes-underwear, which grossed $70million in 1984, the year after it was introduced, and Obsession, which was released in March 1985. Still, there were ample reasons for Klein to be concerned about his image. For one thing, the health rumors persisted, despite the affair with Rector.

What’s more, because of the Puritan purchase, Klein and Schwartz “were personally on the hook to Manufacturers Hanover,” says Corky Newman. “The worst of the jeans crash occurred after the acquisition,” adds Fred McCarthy, an executive of Drexel Burnham Lambert, the investment house. “It went from jeans everywhere to jeans nowhere. The banks were somewhat nervous.” Klein and Schwartz needed long-term financing to retire the onerous short-term bank debt.

A former Klein employee says that at dinner one night, Klein told his friend Barry Diller about the loans. Then the chairman of Paramount Pictures (a subsidiary of Gulf & Western Industries, which, through its Kayser-Roth division, had bought Klein’s women’s-underwear business), Diller was alsoaffiliated with companies that bought issues from Drexel, the pioneer of the high-yield-junk-bond business. In response to Klein’s plea, “Diller made a call,” the employee continues. “Within days, Calvin was meeting Drexel.”

In 1985, Klein and Schwartz attended Drexel’s so-called Predators’ Ball, where companies seeking financing made presentations to investors like Guy Dove III, a former Drexel employee; Dort Cameron, who works for the Bass family of Texas; and industrialist Carl Lindner. That year, Drexel placed $70 million in high-interest, high-risk notes for Calvin Klein Industries. There were two types of notes sold: senior notes paying 137/a percent interest, which come due in 1993, and subordinated notes paying 145/s percent, which are due in 1995. Dove’s Atlantic Capital Corporation bought $4 million of Klein’s notes, the Bass Investment Limited Partnership anted up $15 million, and Lindner’s Great American Insurance Company chipped in $5 million. David Paul, chairman of Florida’s CenTrust Savings Bank, kicked in $20 million and became a director of Calvin Klein. McCarthy says there has been limited movement in the notes since their original issuance. Schwartz has attended several more Predators’ Balls, McCarthy says.

Drexel was a shareholder in some of the investing companies and, in addition to its $3.3-million fee, came away from the deal with an option to buy an equity stake-1 1/a percentin Calvin Klein Industries should the company go public. That was its plan, Newman says. But in 1985, a stock offering was abandoned when “Drexel gave them the real price” Klein and Schwartz could realize for the company, another former Klein executive says. “Calvin recoiled. It was less than he expected.” Newman confirms that the plan was shelved.

* * *

ANOTHER PROBLEM CONCERNED KLEIN’s ONCE-successful men’s-wear licensee, Bidermann Industries. Key employees were leaving. The line wasn’t doing well. One former design-staff member believes Rector’s preppy influence on Klein’s personal style hurt the collection: “All of a sudden it was rep ties and plaid suits. He’d loved being boyish. Then he became this proper gentleman. It was as though he was denying everything that had gone before.”

Festering disputes arose between Klein and the manufacturer. Bidermann’s 1977 license with Klein had been for all his men’s clothes. But when Puritan won the jeans license in 1978, it received a sublicense to make a few specific items for men: jeans and Western shirts,for example. “There were immediate disagreements,” says a former Klein executive. “Calvin’s weight came down on Puritan’s side.” Displeased with the quality of Bidermann’s manufacturing, he began withholding necessary approvals for its designs and finally “refused to work,” a former Bidermann executive charges. In 1986, lawyers for Bidermann began “investigating Calvin’s lack of attention, attendance, and cooperation,” says a Bidermann designer.

In the fall of 1986, it became obvious that Klein was under great stress. In September, Bergdorf Goodman introduced his exclusive couture collection at a benefit dinner full of society people. Steve Rubell had helped organize the event to restore the Pulitzer Fountain. “I’d never seen a man so nervous,” a staffer says of Klein. “He’d had a lot of different substances to calm down.” During the dinner that followed the show, Klein shared a table with Rector; the evening’s chairman, Nancy Kissinger; two Pulitzers; Vogue’s editor, Grace Mirabella; and Bernadine Morris of the Times, among others. In a scene that was becoming common, Klein drank most of a bottle of vodka that had been placed before him.

Nine days later, Klein married Rector in the office of the mayor of Rome. They shared their honeymoon in Italy with design assistants who’d accompanied them on what was officially a fabric-buying trip. Staffers even joined the newlyweds when they went out at night.

* * *

BACK IN NEW YORK, THE NEW MRS. KLEIN “DISAPPEARED” from the studio, says a former assistant. “She started going to the Hamptons.” The mood in the studio was “completely different. Much nicer.” For the line, the assistant says, “it was like a rebirth” because the attitude was no longer ” `Let’s design Kelly’s personal wardrobe.’ ” At the end of the year, Grace Coddington, a British Vogue editor, replaced Kelly, at a reported six-figure salary. Klein, who over the years had become more an executive editor than a day-to-day designer, further removed himself from the design process.

Kelly Klein, however, still had a role to play besides riding her beloved horses. Her husband told an executive of a New York specialty store that his marriage had opened up new “publicity opportunities” for his company. He proved his point soon after when he bought Kelly a pearl necklace and ring from the duchess of Windsor’s collection. In January 1987, the Kleins made their first social splash as a married couple at the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s awards dinner. In February, Klein bought property worth almost $6 million in East Hampton. (He’d sold his Fire Island and Key West houses the year before.) He even told reporters that he’d stopped drinking and smoking for his new wife.

Klein apparently fell off the wagon coincidentally with another round of business reversals. Staff changes continued unabated. “The turnover is quite remarkable,” says an outside contractor who has worked on Klein’s fashion shows for several years. “Every season there’d be different people there.” Says another former designer, “I wondered how I survived.”

In April, Klein’s dispute with Bidermann was settled when he bought back his license for a reported $13 million. Then, on the first Monday in June, Calvin Klein Industries president Corky Newman resigned. The same day, the eve of a fabricbuying trip to Europe, several designers and assistants who’d been hired to create an in-house men’s line were fired. The next day, Edward M. Jones III, a former executive of the Klein division at Bidermann, resigned a new job as president and international-licensing director of Klein’s moderately priced Classics division. It was a lousy week, but things got worse.

* * *

LAST OCTOBER, THE SALE OF CALVIN KLEIN Industries to another Drexel-financed company, Triangle Industries, a container manufacturer, fell through on the day the stock market crashed. Klein grew “terribly depressed” and started “taking Valium all day long from nerves,” says a friend. In November, Klein’s women’s spring ready-to-wear collection was roundly panned-a shift of emphasis toward evening dresses from the simple daytime sportswear that had always been Klein’s forte “didn’t go down so well in Middle America,” according to the head of one prestigious big-store chain. Coddington’s key designer, Steven Slowik, was fired after that show. A week later, Classics, which was unprofitable, was abruptly shut down.

Once again, Klein rumors began ricocheting around New York. Some were about business. Schwartz has denied it, but a top money manager says the Klein company is still for sale, “if you want to buy it.” There was also talk that Klein and Schwartz were trying to buy Minnetonka Industries, their cash-rich fragrance-and-cosmetics licensee. By late last year, the two men had bought over 12 percent of the company’s stock and filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission stating that they might seek control of the highly profitable company. Subsequently, Minnetonka adopted measures to make a hostile takeover difficult but denied the actions were aimed against Klein and Schwartz, whose ventures generate most of Minnetonka’s revenues.

Mostly, though, the gossip was about the Kleins’ marriage. Friends of Kelly’s were concerned, particularly those who believed, as one puts it, that “there was business stuff behind it at first.” When she’d started dating Klein, this friend had asked about her life with him. She answered that things were fine. “His past didn’t bother her,” the friend says.

These days, another friend reports, Kelly will sometimes “shake her head and say, `It’s really hard.’ I don’t know how she’s coping. But she’s a big girl. She knew what she was getting into.”

At the heart of the rumors were the facts that Klein was frequently seen in hip nightspots with Rubell and his crowd and that the Kleins maintained separate apartments as they searched for a new home. Klein has a large, contemporary penthouse he bought from the composer Jerry Herman on Central Park West. Kelly was a few blocks away in an oldfashioned duplex she’d bought from the model Christie Brinkley. Their first attempt to get a place together failed in January 1987, when the nearby San Remo co-op board refused Klein’s bid to buy the producer Robert Stigwood’s penthouse.

Though Kelly put a good public face on it, calling the rumors “funny,” privately she was upset. “It’s mind-boggling,” Patricia Burnham, a Realtor friend of Kelly’s, says of the rumor-mongering. “It’s so unfair.” Last December, Burnham quietly found Klein a $6.95-million townhouse on East 76th Street. It belonged to an offshore corporation owned by a man involved in a divorce. “There were lots of liens and lawsuits on it,” Burnham says. But knowing how much Kelly liked it, Klein “hired a whole team of lawyers” and “cleared up the suits.”

“You’ve never met a husband more adoring than Calvin Klein,” Burnham concludes.

The feeling is apparently mutual. “Kelly is the best thing that ever happened to him,” a friend of Klein’s says. “Maybe she loves him for all the wrong reasons, but she loves him,” agrees a former co-worker.

Still, she couldn’t keep him from “bottoming out,” as one friend puts it.

Some of Klein’s acquaintances saw signs of trouble in his increasing concern with the worlds of money and society. “He got to the point where unless somebody was worth $100 million, they were nobody as far as he was concerned,” one former executive says.

“Now he wants to enter the world of society,” says another former employee. Before his last show, he was juggling the invitation list “to make room for socialites. It’s like he’s trying to prove something. Calvin no longer knows what he wants in his collection or his life.”

All the rumors and all the business problems added to the incalculable pressure of having to be judged time and again on collections that must be new, but not too new. And it’s easy to believe that Klein, having been through so many scenes, erected so many fagades, and lived with so many self-images, could have lost sight of the boy from the Bronx.

“It’s tough to face yourself at every level,” says designer Diane von Furstenberg, a friend. “At this point, he’s facing himself, I guess.”

In late April, Klein checked into Hazelden, a 288-acre, campuslike clinic for the chemically dependent in Center City, Minnesota, which has been treating cross-addiction since the fifties. Its celebrated patients have included Truman Capote, William Hurt, and Kitty Dukakis. Several New York gossip columnists got wind of the story and checked with Paul Wilmot, who insisted that Klein was vacationing in the Caribbean. Finally, on Monday, May 9, Wilmot’s office released a statement saying that Klein had been in Hazelden for almost two weeks.

“I have never felt better,” the designer was quoted as having said.

* * *

THE OUTLOOK IS POSITIVE for this latest Calvin Klein. Zack Carr returned to the studio in December 1987, and the fall collection, now in stores, was a critical success. Kelly Klein, too, has returned to her husband’s employ after a brief stint at HG magazine. As vice-president in charge of special projects, she has a mandate to help Klein in all areas of the business. And while Klein was in Hazelden, his first franchised retail store opened in Dallas.

Initial sales of Eternity indicate that Klein has another great success on his hands. Its name may symbolize Klein’s hope that his name will survive him, as the names of Dior and Chanel survived those designers, but for now, his presence is still required. As the Klein company’s 1985 Securities and Exchange Commission filing put it, “There can be no assurance that [Calvin Klein Industries’] present level of sales could be maintained if the personal design and supervisory services of Calvin Klein were no longer available to it.”

That’s why, a few weeks after leaving the clinic and ten days after his appearance at Saks, Klein flew down to Washington on his Gulfstream II jet for a black-tie fashion show benefiting the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. The day of the show, Klein toured the high school, signing autographs for its awed students.

“To the kids, what he’s done is real important,” said Peggy Cooper Cafritz, the benefit’s chairman. “To them, there’s a heroic dimension to his not letting himself be pulled all the way down.”

Has Klein at last become Calvin Clean? It’s a perfect image for the nineties. And it might even play for eternity.

©1988 Michael Gross

He grimaces as he shrugs off his coat and sits down for lunch at Il Cantinori, a Tuscan restaurant he favors a few blocks from his Greenwich Village penthouse. It is three days before Christmas, but Richard Gere isn’t feeling festive. For one thing, his back is killing him. A month before, he’d finished work on First Knight, a period romance shot in England in which he plays Lancelot to Sean Connery’s King Arthur and Julia Ormond’s Guinevere; all that horseback riding and broadsword fighting sent the forty-fiveyear-old actor to a chiropractor.

But his back isn’t all that aches. A week after Gere returned to New York, he and his wife, Cindy Crawford, issued a joint statement admitting they’d split up during the previous summer. Their relationship, long the subject of an inquisition by the media, has now become carrion. And unlike Lancelot, Gere can’t fight his way back to Camelot.

He has invited me to lunch, ostensibly to decide whether he will be interviewed by Esquire. The deal is, no tape recorder, no notebook, no quotes. To ease the tension, I repeat something that Gere’s costar in American Gigolo, Lauren Hutton, had said to me a few days before. “You can only be the sexiest couple alive for so long,” she mused. “It tends to bring out the worst in people.”

Gere flares. He’s a regular guy, he insists, his marriage normal, the stresses and strains the same as anyone else’s. Implicit is his belief that everyday notions of privacy also apply to him. But that, of course, is not the case, as recent events have shown. After a dinner with Uma Thurman, paparazzi besieged them, cutting her face with a lens. A few days later, Gere was accosted by the press at the Barcelona airport. It all comes with the sex-symbol territory, yet he still feels embattled and aggrieved.

He finally agrees to an interview-but only if it’s conducted in Mundgod, a Tibetan-exile settlement in southern India, where he’s going in a few days for a teaching with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader whom devotees call His Holiness. He seems surprised and unhappy when I agree to accompany him there.

Buddhism has changed the former Methodist from a coke-snorting, skirt-chasing, reporter-baiting bad boy to a sober, socially useful grown-up. His faith speaks to him, answering the questions he asks himself “Why am I here? Why am I suffering? Did I choose this?” Though Buddhism has no easy answers, its riddles and koans soothe the actor, whose livelihood-despite all the applause and perks-has never satisfied him. So I was looking forward to seeing Gere on the one path that has brought him closer to nirvana. Sadly, he withdrew his invitation.

So Gere was press-free that week in Mundgod, as he watched the Dalai Lama perform a Kalachakra Initiation, one of the most complex and beautiful Buddhist rites. In the ceremony, cadres of monks toil in eighteen-hour shifts for days to create a mandala of colored sand according to an ancient design. It represents the god Kalachakra’s palace, circumscribed by symbols of earth, water, fire, wind, space, and wisdom. The Dalai Lama then destroys the monks’ work according to yet another time-honored pattern. The point? Impermanence. The Kalachakra says that all is fleeting; illusion underlies reality. Nothing-not art nor beauty nor truth nor celebrity nor Cindy Crawford-is forever.

* * *

Illusion and reality. Beauty and suffering. Desire and denial. Richard Gere has been swaying between those poles ever since he was a nineteen-year-old college dropout making his pact with materialism, offering up his looks and gymnasts bearing as a sacrifice to stardom. But he has never given himself over entirely. Consciously or not, he has modeled his career on Greta Garbo’s. Like her, he prefers silence; like her, he has an image that is largely defined by sexual ambiguity.

But unlike Garbo, Gere got married. And now, his marriage over, he has apparently decided to set things straight. Although he wouldn’t go on the record, he allowed dozens of friends and colleagues to speak for him. Among them is one who claims to know Gere at least as well as he knows himself. Since he demanded anonymity, I call him Hermes, after the messenger of Greek mythology who symbolized eloquence, invention, cunning, and theft.

“There’s an element of self-loathing in most actors that makes them want to be someone else,” says Hermes, explaining why Gere acts. Gere grew up middle-class; that’s the self he loathes. “He hated being normal,” says an ex-girlfriend, actress Penelope Milford. So, by age twenty, he’d turned-outwardly at least-into someone else: a brooding hunk, just right for his times, the late sixties. Gere was a little bit Brando, a little bit Dean, a whiff of Clift-and everyone, male and female, wanted to take him home. A quarter century later, his calling card is still his vulnerable yet dangerous sexuality. But it is also his greatest weakness.

Some think he stirs up desire on purpose. “He’d flirt with dirt,” one woman observes. Others say it’s a natural force. “Women lined up,” adds one of his costars. “They’d be ducking under caterers’ trucks, diving out of windows, falling like coconuts from the trees. I can’t name names, but you’d be surprised. It was scary and poignant and hilarious.”

Straight men like the indestructible rumor that Gere is gay, because it reduces his threat. He is in fact aggressively heterosexual, but that hasn’t stopped men from hoping. “There have been probably hundreds of thousands of wishful thinkers,” says Gere’s agent, Ed Limato. In the absence of hard facts, that turns out to be the best explanation anyone has to offer for why Gere became the subject of the most pervasive, vicious, and baroque Hollywood tale in recent memory: that he not only is a closet case but also was a participant in an act of interspecies romance, requiring an emergency visit to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Though Gere was in India at the time of his supposed hospital stay, this malevolent story has trailed him ever since his back-to-back 1980 appearances as a high-class boy whore in American Gigolo and a conniving, decadent German gay in Broadway’s Bent.

* * *

Gere has said over and over that he’s fascinated with sex roles and how people transcend them, so it should come as no surprise that he keeps choosing characters who dance in the gray zone between the sexes. More than anything, Gere has played to the ambiguous image others had of him; he wasn’t oblivious to who was buying all those tickets, wasn’t about to dash their fantasies. After all, fantasy is what acting is all about.

Gere’s relationship with Cindy Crawford coincided with the second act of his professional life. After a string of flops, he’d made himself scarce in the late 198os while he devoted his formidable celebrity to the service of Tibet. His immersion, beginning in 1987, in the suffering of its exiled people helped him look beyond himself and finally grow up. But not entirely. Though he’d made progress on the road to nirvana, he sometimes stumbled. So he returned to the movies, and when Cindy demanded that he marry her soon afterward, threatening to leave him if he didn’t, he acquiesced.

That he loved her there is no doubt, tabloid speculations notwithstanding. The man everyone wanted finally wanted someone else-someone who, as it turns out, walked out on him. In retrospect, what happened seems karmic. Richard Gere got dumped.

* * *

They called him Dick in the middle-class suburb of Syracuse, New York, where he grew up in the same tract house that his Anglo-Irish parents live in today. His father was an insurance agent, his mother a plump housewife; both sang in the church choir. Dick was in the Key Club, the varsity club, the band, the boys’ glee club, and the choir. He was vice-president of the student council for two years. He played piano, banjo, guitar, and trumpet. He was also a star gymnast.

In high school, Gere rushed a fraternity but dropped out when his brothers-to-be peed on several pledges. Says boyhood friend Chuck Parry “So to protest fraternities, we started our own, the Royal Order of the Mystic Carp.” Gere and Parry cleaned up “a whole bunch of fish bones and wore them to school on necklaces,” earning a summons to the dean’s office.

Gere was cocky even then. On a dare, he arrived at auditions for a student production of The King and I and announced that he would accept only the lead. He got it, and in the process he found his calling. “He was in a shell,” says Hermes. “Acting let him out.” At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Gere tried out for the lead in a postmodern Hamlet. He wanted it desperately, pacing the halls of the theater while waiting for the cast list to be posted. “He was extremely sexual, a beautiful guy,” recalls the play’s director, Vincent Brann. “The kids in the company-both gay and straight-were much smitten with him.” But Gere had other things on his mind.

The dream of every acting student was a summer-stock job with the Provincetown Players, a well-regarded company that didn’t traffic in frothy fare. The last of several hundred students to audition in the spring of 1969, Gere “riveted our attention,” says Paul Barstow, then the company’s co-artistic director. He won a spot in the troupe and then made a fast impression in performances variously dubbed “vivid,” “irresistible,” and “affecting” by local critics. He also became a favorite of the other artistic director, Bill Roberts, who, like the Amherst students before him, was “terribly smitten” with Gere, says another actor in the company.

Provincetown, a community as well-known for its homosexual life as for its intellectual one, was a real education for Gere. Says Barstow, “I’d been struggling with coming out. I don’t think Richard related at all. I shared a dressing room with that gorgeous hunk for a whole summer, but there was never the slightest indication he was gay.” Indeed, just the opposite. When Gere arrived at Barstow’s house, where he sublet a room, he showed up with a woman, who stayed with him for a few days. She was the first girl he’d slept with, but he didn’t share that fact, or much else, with the other actors.

Edwin McDonough, a fellow Player, compares Gere to Orpheus, “descending into that town,” where “a significant percentage, male and female, was eager to possess him. It was very threatening.” Barstow agrees. “How do you go about your life and your career when you’re a stick of dynamite in a pyrotechnic environment?” he says. “He wore a mask of confidence. But he projected `Noli me tangere, don’t touch me.”‘.

Gere quit school when Roberts offered him a job at the Seattle Repertory Theater. Roberts’s wife, Janet, a literary agent, introduced the young actor to her ex-assistant, Ed Limato. “It was a golden time for him,” says Hermes. “These people thought he was great. He didn’t quite know why. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

With his patched jeans, work shirts, army jacket, shoulder-length hair, and acoustic guitar, Gere was perfect for the ongoing part of house hippie; he was hired to represent, as a member of the Seattle company puts it, “what was happening with kids.” But Seattle wasn’t Provincetown, and Gere didn’t get star treatment. Bored and distracted, he left before the season ended. He arrived in New York City in late 1970, moving into a cockroach-infested apartment on the Lower East Side with his lover from Seattle, the rep company’s stage manager-“the first real woman in his life,” Hermes says.

Gere soon left her for Milford, costar of his first New York production, a folk musical. The pair shared a former plumbing-supply store flanked by gay bars near the Hudson River piers. Torn between music and acting, Gere found jobs that let him pursue both. After understudying for Barry Bostwick in Grease, Gere got Bostwick’s part, the lead, in the London production. While Gere was there, Milford, a free spirit, started dating Craig Baumgarten, an aspiring producer. “Penny, who always used to think these things were amusing, made a date with both of us when Gere returned,” Baumgarten says. “I ended up buying this sullen young actor dinner.” They became fast friends. “We had a lot of fun,” he says. “We did a lot of crazy things. Most of which I won’t talk about.”

Gere had bought a motorcycle in England, and now he rode it all over New York, dressed in black leather. His behavior matched his getup. Milford says that he would often get drunk and disappear for hours. Gere has said he was also taking drugs. When he was abruptly fired from the lead role in a film about street gangs, The Lords of Flatbush, Gere took to bed with his coat on and stayed there for three days. After he emerged, he took up transcendental meditation.

It must have helped. In rapid succession, Gere made Days of Heaven, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and Bloodbrothers. Then, in 1978, he collected his last unemployment check and headed back to England to make Yanks.

When Gere arrived home in October 1978, he “found out he was a movie star,” Hermes says. Everyone wanted a piece of him. Says Ed Limato, “There was a lot of attention and, frankly, Richard didn’t want it.” Gere took his agent’s advice and ended up hiring a neophyte press agent named Peggy Siegal, who interviewed reporters herself before allowing them to interview Gere.

One writer who passed the audition was Ladies’ Home Journal’s Jane Lane. At the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, Lane found Gere depressed and Siegal “bouncing off the walls,” she says. “You know how some intelligent people act like fools in front of movie stars? He asked for gum. Peggy pulled this wad from her mouth and said, `Take mine.”‘ Despite such fascinating, if raw, material, Lane felt she had no story. “He was terminally small-town, with a chip on his shoulder,” she recalls. “Frankly, I was bored, so I tried to liven it up.”

“Does it bother you that you’re viewed as a sex object?” she asked. “Or are you gay?”

“You want to see a sex object?” Gere shot back, reaching for his zipper.

“He took out his johnson,” Lane continues. “It just petered out after that, so to speak.”

At the end of 1978, Gere left Penny Milford for Sylvia Martins, a gorgeous Brazilian painter-cum-party-girl whom he would be more or less involved with for seven years. “It was the Studio 54 days,” Martins says of their impulsive first assignation. “You did things without thinking because you were young and pretty. You’d see someone and go for it.” After Gere’s first Cannes Film Festival (he flew over with Jeffrey Katzenberg, then a Paramount executive, he and Martins headed to Nepal, where he had his first encounter with Tibetans. “In a makeshift refugee camp beneath the Nepalese Himalayas, I bargained shamelessly with an old Tibetan woman for a beautiful bowl, which had been in her family for a very long time,” Gere would later tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I will long remember that woman’s dignity in the face of losing not only her country but all of her belongings.”

Back in America, Gere and Martins moved to Greenwich Village, and he began work on the Broadway play Bent. A rave review in TherNew York Times referred only obliquely to the show’s most infamous scene, in which Gere brings another man to orgasm by fantasizing aloud about performing oral sex on him. When American Gigolo opened two months later, offering up a brief glimpse of Gere’s penis and also hints of homoeroticism (“Richard was flirting with his sexual persona,” Gigolo director Paul Schrader would later say, Gere’s sex life took on a life of its own.

In April 1980, he appeared bare-chested on the cover of People magazine. The headline called him “a reluctant new sex symbol.” The cover photograph infuriated Gere. He’d asked Peggy Siegal to withhold the topless photographs from People, but she’d given them to the magazine anyway. He fired her, but the damage was done. “Peggy Siegal pushed that so hard and wouldn’t back off from it,” says Hermes. “That creature in the press had so little to do with him.” Poor Richard. The press, the penis, and the iconic roles had created an ambisexual monster.

It was then that the rumors about Gere’s secret gay life started. They would persist and recur with a vengeance in 19go, when Pretty Woman was released. “But it was old hat by then,” says Bent’s director, Robert Allan Ackerman. (Some around Gere believe that the revival of the talk in iggo was part of a campaign by the Chinese government to discredit its enemies in the Tibetan-liberation movement by discrediting Tibet’s most conspicuous friend.

Gere has rarely acknowledged or discussed the rumor, except to say that denying it would denigrate homosexuals. He has also contributed to it by acting in contradictory ways that suggest he has experienced homosexual twinges. When an attractive gay man bummed a cigarette from Sylvia Martins one night in a restaurant, Gere caught his eye. “I’ll give you something to put in your mouth,” he said, fingering his zipper. .

Though Gere is willing to play gay parts-on- and offstage-his friends all insist he’s resolutely heterosexual. “Hollywood’s favorite game is starting rumors about who’s gay and who’s not,” says Craig Baumgarten, now a producer. “If young actors like Richard didn’t put out or they wouldn’t play ball with certain powerful people in this business who were gay, the rumors started in order to spite them.”

Jeffrey Katzenberg seems to agree. “The fact is, Richard plays the game by his rules, not by everybody else’s,” he says. “Richard is not beholden to very many people, and maybe there are people that are threatened by that-they feel compelled to try and hurt him.”

Following Gigolo and Bent, Gere signed on to play Zack Mayo in Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman. The story of a rebel who is humbled in naval-pilot training and harnessed by a good woman’s love, Officer was a huge hit. It grossed more than $ioo million, becoming one of the top films that year. But the higher his hunk profile grew, the more Gere tried to downplay it-without success. “We’d have interesting philosophical conversations in restaurants,” says artist Joseph Kosuth, who met Gere through Martins. “Richard would be quoting Heidegger or Nietzsche and a woman would reach over, squeeze his muscles, and say, `Oooooh, Richard Gere!’”

Those encounters were merely annoying; others were downright dangerous. Once, a truck driverwho didn’t like the idea of a handsome gigolo sleeping with somebody’s wife-literally ran Gere off the road. “Post-Gigolo, he was getting hounded and he hated it,” says Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, one of Gere’s close friends. .

Although Gere had stopped taking drugs and drinking, his aggressive, exhibitionistic side still dominated. “He could be obnoxious, a show-off, screaming, loud,” Martins says. “When you’re shy and insecure, like all actors are, you need to do something. He used to take his pants down because it was a good way to end a conversation.”

Gere did enjoy some of the perks of fame. In 1982, he helped cast Breathless, spending three days in bed nude screen-testing various French actresses before deciding on nineteen-year-old Valerie Kaprisk~; who cried when Gere left her at filming’s end. “He had things, yeah, on the side, always,” says Martins. “I was not always there. We didn’t have a real committed relationship.” Neither was Gere committed to his career. Indeed, in the next few years, it often seemed he was trying to kill it. “He wanted to play in movies that wouldn’t be big hits,” Martins says. “He chose parts people didn’t want him to play.”

To hear Ed Limato list Gere’s films of the early eighties is to hear a litany of disappointment: “Breathless … pretty fucking daring, but the audience from Officer didn’t want to see Richard Gere playing a nihilist … `Ihe Honorary Counsel … interesting film … Cotton Club … unfortunately, there was never a script … King David … that took a long time to recover from … Power … good film, commercial failure … No Mercy … not successful … Miles from Home … really the lowest point. His acting was terrific, but it only played a week.”

Like his career, Gere’s relationship with Martins fizzled out in the mid-eighties. He dated a series of women, including fashion icon Tina Chow. Her friends felt he took advantage of her, but when she later developed AIDS, Gere lent her his Westchester house as a retreat. She died in 1992, and at her memorial service, he signed the guest book, “I loved … ” Says another mourner, “I’m sure it was well-meant, but it had nothing to do with anyone except Richard Gere.”

There was one thing he cared about more than himself. Buddhism “was the most exciting thing in his life,” says Hermes. In the early eighties, Jann Wenner set in motion a train of introductions that led Gere to Dharmsala, the seat of Tibet’s government in exile, and the Dalai Lama. “The whole idea of being famous took on a new meaning then,” Hermes adds. Gem decided to exploit himself for Buddhism.

His great achievement was New York’s Tibet House, a cultural center he started in 1987. “He was the first president, hands-on, worked all the time,” says Tibet House’s current head, Robert Thurman, who happens to be Uma’s father. Gere raised and gave money, planned events, and even worked on brochures, profoundly altering the profile of his pet cause. “Whenever people speak of Tibet, they mention Richard Gere,” says Rinchen Dharlo, the Dalai Lama’s American representative. The old, angry Gere still made cameo appearances, though. As Tibet House began to attract other powerful supporters, there were clashes. “Richard has a very strong personality” says writer John Avedon, who’d hooked Gere up with the Dalai Lama. “Others on the board do, too.”

Gere finally stepped down as president, but he remains on the board and continues to donate time and money. He was replaced by Elsie Walker (a cousin of George Bush’s), and then by Thurman-who, at the end of our interview, abruptly changed the subject to his actress daughter. “I want to say that it is not true that they are having an affair,” he declared. “Absolutely not.”

Photographer Herb Ritts has been a close friend of Gere’s since they first met in Los Angeles in the late seventies. Ritts worked for his family, selling acrylic furniture, until the day that he, Penny Milford, and Gere, fresh from the Days of Heaven set, drove to the desert in Milford’s Buick LeSabre and got a flat tire. At a gas station, Ritts pulled out a camera and started taking pictures. Peggy Siegal sent some of those shots out to magazines, and Ritts had a lucrative new line of work. By 1988, Ritts was arguably more important in Hollywood than Gere, whose career was plummeting. “There was nothing out there for him,” says Hermes.

But in fact there was: Cindy Crawford. Gere was staying with Ritts when the photographer’s mother, Shirley, “pushed them together,” Ritts recalls.

“He fell in love, and it was very deep and very true,” says Hermes soulfully.

* * *

Love seemed to revitalize his career. Within a few months, Gere was back before the cameras. Internal Affairs was released in January 1ggo, followed by the enormously successful Pretty Woman in March. That month, Gere and Crawford went public with their romance, appearing together at the Academy Awards. Unquestionably, their linkup helped both of them. “Richard and Cindy together in public didn’t just double the hysteria-it magnified it a hundred times over,” says Maggie Wilde, Gere’s partner in his production company. “But it really, really, really wasn’t calculated. Certainly not on his part.” Wilde isn’t the only person close to Gere who seems to suggest that the marriage amounted to a career move for Crawford.

Gere’s next film, Mr. Jones, was in production when he and Crawford decided to get married. Or, rather, she decided and he agreed. “Richard had always evaded the altar,” says Limato. “There came a night when I got a call saying, `Cindy’s very upset and just told me either I marry her or she’s walking out on me. What should I do?’ He called [Katzenberg], and Jeffrey arranged a Disney jet to take us to Vegas, and they got married that night.” After a ceremony in a tacky chapel, they flew back to Los Angeles; Gere had a 5:00 A. M. call. As it happens, in Mr. Jones he played a manicdepressive who talks his way into a construction job in order to take a tightrope walk on a roof beam and then threaten to leap off. Gere had just taken a flying leap himself.

Mixed signals abounded. Cindy and Richard went to India; it wasn’t her dream vacation. Then they began house hunting in L. A., revisiting one place three timesseparately. “Separate is the operative word,” the Chicago SunTimes wrote. “The Geres have never looked at the place together.” Finally, in May 1993, they bought a ten-thousand-square-foot Georgian-style estate in Bel-Air for just under $5 million. By the time the house was decorated, their marriage was disintegrating.

Nonetheless, that October, People ran a cover story on Gere and Crawford, headlined, SOMETIMES LOVE IS JUST WHAT IT SEEMS. Unfortunately, in their case, it wasn’t. A month later, Gere got on an airplane and headed to Beijing and Tibet-alone. “They were in a lot of trouble,” Hermes says.

And so 1994 began for Gere and Crawford with rumors that their marriage was breaking up and ended with its doing just that. In between came increasingly unbelievable denials-particularly a $30,000 ad in the London Times in which the couple professed their love, their heterosexuality, their monogamy. The idea for the ad came from Gere’s advisers. “He was talked into it,” says Limato. “She agreed to it. He had turned the other cheek for too long.”

In hindsight, that ad was a challenge the gods couldn’t resist and one their shaky marriage couldn’t survive. Gere flew to London for sword training for First Knight. Then, just before the start of filming in July, something happened. Says a source on the set, “He got blindsided. When they took out the ad, he didn’t know what was going on. He thought they were working on their marriage. And then he discovered something he didn’t know, and that spun him around.”

Cindy was seeing a former flame-ex-model and Whiskey Bar co-owner Rande Gerber. When Gere found out, he “told Cindy he was going to start seeing other people,” says Hermes. “He said, `I gotta have a life.”‘

Soon Gere met Laura Bailey, a twenty-two-year-old British model, at a London party for the Dalai Lama. In August, they were spotted lying on blankets in a hotel garden, and later, dallying over dinner at La Colombe d’Or in St.Paul-de-Vence. Despite Cindy’s presence at Gere’s fortyfifth-birthday party and at the British premiere of Mr. Jones, and despite Bailey’s calling reports of their romance “complete rubbish,” rumors of an impending breakup flourished.

Indeed, the rumors grew more squirrelly by the day. When model Gail Elliott briefly moved into Cindy’s apartment in New York after the failure of her own marriage in September, speculation began that she and Crawford were an item. In October, Gere took the stage at a fundraising event for a gay-and-lesbian lobbying group in London and said, “You’ve all heard some rumors about me over the years. I guess this is the moment to do it. My name is Richard Gere … and I am a lesbian.” That same month, several tabloids noted that Cindy was no longer wearing her wedding ring. The Bel-Air house quietly went on the market.

Meanwhile, Gere’s rented house in London was under siege. Laura Bailey was photographed leaving on several consecutive mornings in November. The British tabloids had a field day with that. Bailey’s father, an Oxford don, grumbled that when his daughter gave up academics for modeling, it was “the saddest day of my life.”

On the First Knight set, Gere kept his cool. “He’s a guy who has volatility and anger inside him, which is part of what makes him a great screen presence,” director Jerry Zucker says. “But he moderates it, he sublimates.” Becoming a character-especially Lancelot-was a great escape; Gere’s turmoil reflected the central theme of Zucker’s movie, the tug-of-war between obligations and emotions. But Gere’s behavior off the set wasn’t exactly Zen. He went to a party for Katzenberg at Elton John’s home that was also attended by the Princess of Wales and Sylvester Stallone, who years before had starred in the gang film Gere was fired from, The Lords of Flatbush. Depending on which account you heard, the evening either ended with Sly and Gere giving Diana “fits of giggles” or with the two macho model hounds snarling over Cindy C. “I hear you’re sleeping with my wife,” Gere supposedly said. Stallone later called the incident “bizarre,” the accusation “completely out of line-and totally untrue,” and Gere “a coward” and “a confused man” who was “having delusions.” Gere supposedly responded by calling Stallone “a lowlife” while imitating his ‘dese-‘dem-‘dose accent.

So it was almost a relief-and certainly an explanation-when it finally emerged that the Richard-Cindy union really was experiencing meltdown. Inexplicably, Cindy chose that moment to hold a televised press conference and complain, “All these things they write are just lies. It is really bad gossip that is not based in truth at all.”

What was she thinking? “Cindy is secretive,” says an executive of her agency, Elite Models. “She tells you nothing.” Crawford’s friends have stayed mum, too. “A lot of people are asking, offering payments,” Elliott reports. “Only Richard and Cindy know what happened. People can say what they want.”

One friend of Cindy’s, a man on the model scene, defends her. “Gere’s a boring fucking Buddhist,” he says. “He’s done it all. He meditates all day. She wants to run around and drink tequila and have fun all night. She’s only twentyeight, for chrissake!” .

In the face of the press storm about Gere’s affair with Laura Bailey, his friends felt the need to defend him, too. “Richard is no angel,” says one, “but he tried to do the right thing. It’s ridiculous to say he broke this up.” Some of Gere’s friends have started calling Cindy cynical. “None of this has hurt her,” one snipes bitterly. “She said all she wanted was to be married and have children and not a career. Turned out the opposite. No kids, lots of career.” Now Gere even has to worry about going marquee-a-marquee with Crawford, since she is about to make her movie debut next month opposite Billy Baldwin in the Joel Silverproduced action film Fair Game.

But while others are choosing sides, matchmaker Herb Ritts takes a no-fault view toward the breakup of their marriage. “They’re two different kinds of people, but they honestly do love each other,” he says. “They went to a counselor, they took vacations-they really tried to make it work.” Ritts adds that the relationship was over before either of them strayed. “Someone had an affair first, but it wasn’t out of disrespect, it was out of need. It didn’t mean anything. It was a sideshow.”

But Ritts adds there’s a lesson in all of this for Crawford. “As professional and terrific as she is,” he says, “inwardly she has a lot to work out. She was never a teenager-she’s still a girl. In terms of life experience, she’s very different from where Richard is. He’s spiritual. Cindy gave it a try, but she’s not into eating yak butter. I’ve been on the phone with both of them in tears.” Ritts sighs. “It’s really sad.”

First Knight wrapped the day before last Thanksgiving, and Gere flew home to the U. S. On December i, he and Cindy announced that they were “trying to work things out” and had “no present plans for divorce.” Laura Bailey, although described by friends as hurt and upset, was still seeing Gere in the spring. Cindy changed her private phone number and, other than a brief appearance at a benefit (“I’m okay” was all she said, dropped from sight Women’s Wear Daily reported that she’d moved in with Rande Gerber. He won’t comment, except to say, “Just, please, don’t hurt her.”

What of Gere? Frank Dunlop, who once hired him for England’s prestigious Young Vic company, hopes he will return to live theater. “He should have played Hamlet,” Dunlop says. Power director Sidney Lumet thinks Gere is poised for greatness. “He’s a really, really fine and underused actor,” Lumet says. `As he gets older, the parts will be more interesting and he’ll stop being the sex symbol.”

Just after the breakup of his marriage was announced, Gere met with producer Frank Mancuso Jr. in Hollywood, and the two men talked about divorce. Gere was hanging on to the idea that his marriage could be saved. “How much of yourself are you willing to give up in order to hold on to something?” Mancuso asked him. “One day, you wake up and say, ‘I don’t like myself anymore.’”

For a moment, Gere seemed sad, but then he brightened. “Richard saw the opportunities in front of him, and he started to like the idea of being single again,” Mancuso says. After a pause, he continues, “You never learn things the way you want to.”

©1995 Michael Gross

It was madness, even by Bloomingdale’s standards. The customers that late-November lunchtime were possessed by an urgency that transcended mere pre-Christmas shopping lust. Suddenly, TV lights came on and cameras started snapping like piranhas as the day’s hottest item, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., the son of America’s thirty-fifth president, stepped onto a platform. Women screamed.

“It was mass hysteria,” one store worker says. “Poor man. I don’t think he had any idea.” Kennedy looked amazed and none too happy. “Oh, dear,” he said as he joined cousins Ted Kennedy Jr. and Willie Smith, Willie’s mother, Jean Kennedy Smith, and Lauren Bacall on the store’s loge level.

Very Special Arts, a Kennedy charity, was behind this sale of boxed Christmas ornaments produced by the retarded in Third World countries. But the TV crews and the screaming women and the pushing paparazzi didn’t care about that. They didn’t care about Betty Bacall, either, or the other Kennedy cousins — all associate trustees of the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation who had funded the program. Says the Bloomingdale’s employee, “They wanted John.”

Kennedy took the microphone. “I hope you’ll all buy a few boxes,” he said. “I’m here to sell boxes, and that’s what I want to get to do.” Of course, by doing that-or, more precisely, by autographing boxes for a few minutes-he got the ornaments mentioned on seven local news shows and Entertainment Tonight. Jill Rapaport, a perky Channel 2 News reporter, even got a brief interview. “It’s really the boxes they should be coming for, not us,” Kennedy told her. Then he got boxed in himself as Rapaport asked how it felt to be one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. “C’mon,” Kennedy pleaded, eyes and hands turning upward. “1 dunno.” He glanced away from the microphone hopelessly. Finally, visibly embarrassed, he said, “It feels okay.” Cut to Rapaport happy-talking in the studio later. “Kinda cute, huh?” she said to the camera.

Although Bloomingdale’s sold almost $50,000 worth of ornaments that day, John Kennedy, 28, considered the appearance disappointing. “We didn’t want it to turn out the way it did,” says Kathy Walther, a Very Special Arts executive. “It was very obnoxious from the second he walked in. John hoped it would be more substantive.”

Unfortunately, substance isn’t ‘the first thing that comes to mind when most people think about John F. Kennedy Jr. First, of course, comes the awful, indelible memory of the little boy in a blue coat and short pants, saluting his father’s bronze coffin.

That image alternates with others not so sober: Kennedy pumped-up and shirtless as People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” Kennedy linked in the columns with an enviable parade-Brooke Shields, Madonna, Daryl Hannah, Molly Ringwald, Princess Stephanie of Monaco.

Those images melded at his political coming-out party, last summer’s Democratic Convention-where John F. Kennedy Jr., tabloid celebrity, was transformed into the living embodiment of a nation’s not-quite-impossible dream: that it will wake up one morning with another JFK in the White House. Uncle Ted Kennedy passed the torch himself when he had John introduce him to the delegates, and though the nephew’s speech didn’t rattle the rafters, there was a surge of emotion in the hall. This was the first time John had ever acted the part of “a Kennedy” on a national stage. And the moment suggested that he could become the ultimate postmodern politician-a blank canvas for fantasies of national destiny.

* * *

The boy in the blue coat is grown up now, and, whether he likes it or not, people still have their eyes on him. He doesn’t like it at all, and friends insist that his life is a quest for anonymity and normality. He may never find privacy (“He’s never known life any different,” says a friend), but he’s won the battle to be normal. Aggressively normal. “Disgustingly normal,” says a friend.

He is also understandably reluctant to give anything away, having already given so much. Kennedy “is trying to have an open life,” says Faith Stevelman, who met him on their second day of law school, in 1986. “He sure turned out to be completely different than I expected. The press makes him out to be a narcissistic celebrity brat, but he’s not. People want to see him that way, because of his father, because of his name, because he’s handsome, but-praise to him-he has a life that’s much more real than that. He likes being in the world.”

He doesn’t like publicity, though. “It curtails his freedom,” Stevelman says.

So, aside from lending his name to good causes, he’s done nothing to attract attention to himself. He’s given only one print interview in his life, to the New York Times, and it wasn’t particularly revealing. Not speaking to reporters “has always been a habit,” says his aunt Lee Radziwill. “We’re not going to start now.”

One former family intimate describes the Kennedy attitude as “a conspiracy of silence, mandated from above. But when they want to get the message out, they do.” John Kennedy declined to be interviewed for this story. But there’s a message his friends want to get out, so many of them cooperated, as did former coworkers and bosses and a few Kennedy-family members.

They are setting the stage for what a Kennedy Foundation executive describes as “John emerging into the public sphere.” After having worked for New York City, a nonprofit developer, the Reagan Justice Department, and apolitically connected Los Angeles law firm, the man who is perhaps the most famous presidential child of the century is about to become one of about 400 assistant district attorneys in the office of Manhattan prosecutor Robert Morgenthau.

Like a favored candidate’s spin doctors before a big debate, Kennedy’s friends are trying to lower expectations. “The most extraordinary thing about him is that he’s extraordinarily ordinary,” says one.

Public appearances to the contrary, friends seem convinced, and want to convince others, that John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. — JFK II — doesn’t really exist. “He wants to be perceived as his own man,” says Peter Allen, a friend since grade school. Says Stevelman heatedly, “He’s not John F. Kennedy Jr. He is himself. It’s `Hi, I’m John.’ ” Just John.

John doesn’t share the problems of some of the other Kennedy cousins of his generation. “Monsters,” the former family friend calls them. A friend of John’s agrees: “They might as well have the name emblazoned on their sleeves.” John does share many traits with his father, though-and people want to believe he shares even more. Just like his father, he is bound up with his immediate family. “All of our lives, there’s just been the three of us — Mommy, Caroline, and I,” John said at his sister’s wedding. Besides them, he’s got a coterie of intensely loyal friends-some of whom go back through prep school just like his father’s. At Brown University, where John earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 1983, his friends literally surrounded him, shielding him from the 14,500 spectators during their mile-long graduation processional. John’s also got his father’s charisma. “Even if he wasn’t John Kennedy,” says his cousin Cecil Auchincloss, “people would notice him at a party. Even as a kid.” Though he seems to disdain Kennedy competitiveness (when he was a child, the cousins called him “Mama’s Boy”), John shares his father’s love of athletics. An active outdoorsman, he skis; rafts, snorkels, hikes, and goes camping. “He’s an overenergetic, can’t-sit-still type,” a friend reports.

Also like his father (and like his mother’s father, Black Jack Bouvier, who had an affair on his honeymoon), John’s got serious sex appeal. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” says a young woman who knows him. “Girls come and go.”

In fact, only with women does John act as if he wanted to be noticed. “It’s no wonder rumors start,” says one woman he’s flirted with. Adds another who encountered him on the street, “He was begging for attention.”

He doesn’t always have to beg. Madonna, this generation’s self-styled Marilyn Monroe, set her cap for John. “He and Madonna were good friends,” says a fast-crowd friend of the Kennedy cousins. “She was obviously the aggressor.”

Friends of John’s also believe that their contacts were all initiated by Madonna. “I think they met when [John’s cousin] Bobby Shriver made his Special Olympics album,” says one pal. “Then Madonna invited John to her concert at Madison Square Garden. She also works out with the same trainer. I don’t think that’s chance.” Though some insist that John has had “dates” with Madonna between rounds in her marital bout with Sean Penn, a close friend of the singer’s sighed when I asked her if the duo’s rumored relationship was real. “If only,” she said.

Many of John’s supposed assignations turn out to be fictions. Another Kennedy “date,” identified in some papers as Molly Ringwald, was actually John’s steady girlfriend of four years, actress Christina Haag. “A good thing,” a friend jokes. “Christina would have believed it.”

Haag, the daughter of a retired businessman, grew up in Manhattan. She is not the blue blood she’s sometimes made out to be; she’s an actress struggling to make ends meet. A graduate of Juilliard, she has played Ophelia at Center Stage in Baltimore, acted in A Matter of Degrees, an independent film about college students, and played the public-relations woman for a hospital in The Littlest Victim, an upcoming TV movie about a doctor who treats children with AIDS. Between jobs, she has checked coats at Elio’s and worked as an assistant to Seventh Avenue designer Christine Thomson.

Luckily, both John and Christina know Daryl Hannah and knew it wasn’t true when, late last year, Suzy said he’d proposed to the star. Says a Kennedy friend, “They’ve all known each other for years.” A gossip item once appeared saying that Hannah, the daughter of a Chicago real-estate magnate, had followed college-age John down a beach on St. Martin. “They were twelve at the time,” says the friend, “and I bet he followed her. If she’d been following him, he would have stopped.”

Then there are the models. Kennedy has met some through Richard Wiese, a Phi Psi fraternity brother at Brown who is now a Ford model. Audra Avizienis, a Click face, told People she had dated John. Now she claims the magazine misquoted her. People’s reporter denies it. So has she gone out with him? “That’s beside the point,” Avizienis snaps.

An older friend of the family considers this all par for the course. “Kennedys love beautiful people, winners,” she says. “They like movie stars, like everyone else. But everybody else isn’t moving in those circles all the time. Kennedy men are intensely, highly sexed. There’s a lot of activity. But the women they marry are solid gold. They need both and they get it. Why not have the cream of the crop?”

There are two other traits Kennedy shares with his father: wit and a penchant for pranks. While working for the city after he graduated from Brown, he kidnapped a secretary’s beloved teddy bears, sent her a ransom note (“We have the bears”), and then executed them in a mock mass hanging. He also sent a stripper to meet with a co-worker who was interviewing prospective secretaries. “I thought she was a good candidate,” the co-worker says. “More articulate than most.”

* * *

Carried to extremes, pranks can reflect an underlying carelessness. But “there’s an incredible amount expected of John,” a friend points out. “He has to sacrifice what a lot of us would consider routine.”

John has had several minor run-ins with the law. Last year, he paid $2,300 in parking tickets. “I later learned the reason [he paid them],” says J. Bertram Shair, the administrative judge who heard Kennedy’s case. “He has to clear himself of all judgments in order to qualify for the D.A.’s office. I don’t think he enjoyed writing the check. He said in view of all the tickets, perhaps he ought to get free parking in the future.” Shair gave him “a gratuitous little lecture. I told him he’s going places. He should take care how he’s perceived.”

The blackest mark on Kennedy’s record is one that will be understood by anyone with a passing knowledge of the habits of 24-year-old men. Between 1984 and 1986, he and a friend sublet a co-op apartment on West 86th Street. According to someone close to the deal, Kennedy was often late with his rent checks and could never remember his keys. “He rang everyone’s buzzer,” the source says. “He drove the super crazy. He had a water bed, which was against the rules. The board was within inches of evicting them.”

Finally, their sublease ran out and the owner returned. “It looked like a herd of yaks had lived there,” the source says. “Somebody had clearly put their fist through the wall. The carpet looked like they’d had cookouts on it. Every surface had to be sanded, spackled, and patched.”

The current president of the building’s co-op board is forgiving, though. “People tend to be tougher on personalities than on the rest of us,” he says.

An older and presumably wiser Kennedy now lives alone in a two-bedroom apartment in the West Nineties. He keeps his keys tied to his belt. Though his new apartment has been “nicely done” with his mother’s decorating help, a friend says it is often “kind of messy.” Christina Haag lives nearby. Kennedy often has breakfast at a health-food restaurant on Columbus Avenue. Then he bicycles 90 or so blocks south to the Village, where he spends his days completing his third and final year at the New York University School of Law. He also works in Brooklyn Family Court, where, as a member of NYU’s Juvenile Rights Clinic, he defends minors accused of felonies.

Late last year, after a series of interviews, he got the $29,000-a-year A.D.A. job, which friends say he coveted. Morgenthau’s office will not confirm Kennedy’s appointment, but friends say he will start work in August.

John and his sister seem to be remarkably solid young people, given the circumstances of their lives, and everyone directs the credit to their mother, Jacqueline Onassis. Under unbearable scrutiny, she raised them amazingly well.

John was known at the three private schools he attended as bright but more rebellious and troubled than Caroline. His most embarrassing teenage moment involved drinking. He and Caroline celebrated their birthdays (his eighteenth, her twenty-first) with a bash at Le Club, arranged by their mother. At five in the morning, as the party broke up, Kennedy and his school friends fought with a National Enquirer photographer. “I opened the door and John was lying in the gutter,” says Patrick Shields, the club’s director, who dusted Kennedy off and deposited him in a taxi. “Jackie’s comment to me the next morning was `I’m walking on a cloud.’ ” Adds Shields, “I don’t think she’d seen the paper yet.”

* * *

John Kennedy has been a public curiosity since he was conceived. He gave out a “lusty cry” at birth, according to the obstetrician who delivered him by cesarean section on November 25, 1960. Seventeen days before, his father had been elected president. As the first White House baby since 1893, John Jr. made front pages around the world. After his christening, his 31-year-old mother imposed a press blackout. The publicity-conscious president fought it with mixed success by sneaking photographers and the kids into the Oval Office when Jackie was out of town, but still, no photos of John were released for a year.

Tidbits about him did leak out, though. In May 1963, he sucked his thumb while meeting astronaut Gordon Cooper but took it out long enough to say “Cooper, Cooper.” And in November 1963, at a Veterans Day program at Arlington National Cemetery, John-John, as he was called, upstaged the troops by performing acrobatics while dangling from the hands of his father and an aide. A few weeks later, the president boarded a helicopter at the White House for a flight to Andrews Air Force Base and then to Dallas. It was the last time he saw the young son Jackie said was “his real kin spirit.”

As a child, John would talk about his father proudly. “He was fascinated,” says a family friend, “and he enjoyed hearing how people responded to that little boy.”

Friends say that now, though John rarely brings up his father, he is gracious when others do. Nevertheless, awkward moments do occur. “One time he was hanging out in somebody’s room,” recalls a fraternity brother, “and they were playing the Stones’ `Sympathy for the Devil’ ” (which contains the lyric “I shouted out, `Who killed the Kennedys?’ / When after all / it was you and me”). “Everyone realized, `Uh-oh.’ But at some point, he’d just walked out and then he walked back in again. He just avoided the situation.”

Friends are careful with him. “It’s never come up and I wouldn’t bring it up,” says Stevelman. “It can’t be an easy thing. During the week of the [twenty-fifth] anniversary [of JFK’s assassination], I was worried for him. Who wants to be exposed to that? But he’s incredibly together about it. I’m sure it moves him. How could it not? But he’s integrating it into a sane life.”

“I think he’s very proud of what his father did,” adds another,

Aristotle Onassis died in Paris on March 15, 1975. Jackie’s $26-million settlement with his estate, negotiated with Christina Onassis, added to established Kennedy trust funds and left the children without financial worries.

During the mid-seventies, John was listed in the Social Register, regularly saw a psychiatrist, and changed schools again, transferring to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. After being held back a year, he finally graduated in 1979. “He certainly wasn’t at the top of his class,” says a longtime friend.

John also. spent some time at Xenon, the club owned by Howard Stein, who calls himself a “disco uncle” to the Kennedy cousins. They were treated like kings by Stein’s partner, Peppo Vanini, who considered them “the closest thing to royals in America,” Stein says, “and made overtures to induce them into our world.”

Robert Kennedy’s children became Xenon regulars, but “John-John was special,” Stein says. “He was less a disco baby. He was shier, ingenuous. He didn’t leverage his name off the way kids of the famous do in my world. He had star quality. So every time he was there, he got his picture in the papers. It took a scandal for the other Kennedy kids to be photographed.”

* * *

In the next half-dozen years, John would be photographed often in discos with a steady girlfriend, Sally Munro, who was in the class ahead of his at Brown. Kennedy, ever the prankster, identified her to photographers as “Lisa, my fiance.”

Nightlife wasn’t the only temptation. Girls slept outside the door of his dorm room when he was a freshman. He later moved into the Phi Psi house and then into a house off campus that he shared with several students, including Christina Haag. Kennedy was also attracted to the stage, appearing in campus productions of Volpone, Short Eyes, and In the Boom Boom Room. Producer Robert Stigwood even offered John a part in a film, as his father. He was interested. His mother, reportedly, was upset.

The professional offers kept coming after he left Brown “bad things, because of who he was,” says Peter Allen. “He thought it would be fun, but he didn’t want to trade on his name.”

Show business remained alluring, though, and in the summer of 1985, Kennedy finally appeared on a Manhattan stage, starring in six invitation-only performances of Winners at the 75seat Irish Arts Center. The show was a workshop mounted by friends from the drama set at Brown. Christina Haag was a costar.

Kennedy and Haag played star-crossed lovers in Northern Ireland. Leaving the theater one night, John told a reporter, “This is not a professional acting debut. It’s just a hobby.” And reports vary on his talent. A Brown critic once took exception to his “prep-school voice.”

Sometime after the short run of Winners, John’s relationship with Sally Munro ended amicably and Christina Haag stepped into the role of girlfriend. “John had had a secret crush on her since he was five,” says a friend. “Actually, I don’t think it was secret. He asked her out every week and she said no every time.”

Friends say Haag is whimsical, stylish, and quite serious about her career-and that her relationship with John has not always helped it. She never trades on him, they say. Indeed, she avoids publicity that might help her. “They make her sound like a hanger-on,” a friend says. “The fact is, her boyfriend takes away from her craft.”

Friends admit that John and Christina have had some rough sledding. For a while after college, John “was playing around a lot,” says a former co-worker. “He got along well with girls. He enjoyed it, like anyone would.” But now, according to friends of Christina’s, the relationship is strong. Haag even refers to herself as his “law widow.”

* * *

Until now, no one has asked much of John Kennedy. But quietly, off the gossip pages, he has built an impressive resume for a young man just starting his career. The summer before he went off to college, he attended National Outdoor Leadership School with students from the United States and Africa, studying mountaineering and environmental issues at 17,000 feet on Mount Kenya. The next summer, he met government and student leaders in Zimbabwe, and worked briefly for a mining company in Johannesburg. Maurice Tempelsman — Jackie’s diamond merchant companion-probably had a hand in planning the trip.

After his sophomore year, he worked for Ted Van Dyk at the Center for Democratic Policy, a Washington-based liberal think tank. Again, Tempelsman suggested that John apply for the student internship. Living with the Shrivers, Kennedy immersed himself in political organizing, advance work, research, and working the room on a fund-raising trip to Hollywood. That summer, he saw for the first time the power he had. “He began to realize he was a celebrity,” says Van Dyk. “He had his first contact with clutchers and grabbers. He handled it.” John even talked back to Norman Lear, who, says Van Dyk, “went on about what close friends he was with the president,” then said he was saving his money for his own lobbying group, People for the American Way. “You’d be better served giving the money to us,” Kennedy said.

John was “genuinely undecided” about his future, and Van Dyk was sympathetic. “You get a churning stomach thinking about all those Kennedy kids in politics,” he says. “You’re pleased to see them respond as several have, yet relieved when any of them decides to do something else. An expectation hangs over them. I don’t think John feels compelled.” Still, back at Brown, John worked for the University Conference for Democratic Policy, which sponsored disarmament forums on northeastern college campuses.

The summer after his junior year, Kennedy and his cousin Tim Shriver tutored underprivileged children in English as part of a University of Connecticut program. Finally, after he graduated, he stopped for some fun, signing on as first mate on the Vast Explorer, searching for the pirate treasure ship Whidah in the waters off Cape Cod.

Following the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco, where he helped Van Dyk raise more money, Kennedy came home and took a job with the city. In his $20,000-a-year position in the Office of Business Development, he worked to attract and keep business in New York. “His references were extraordinary,” says his boss, Larry Kieves. “He worked in the same crummy cubbyhole as everybody else. I heaped on the work and was always pleased.”

John “wasn’t overly sophisticated,” a co-worker adds. “He was one of the few young people there who acted his age.” She fondly recalls how he would change from his bicycle clothes into a suit in the office, but often leave his shirttails hanging out. (Though he still sometimes dresses that way, he was named to the International Best Dressed List this year.)

In 1986, Kennedy switched jobs, moving to the 42nd Street Development Corporation as acting deputy executive director, conducting negotiations with developers and city agencies. Jackie was on the nonprofit company’s board. “John was an intelligent bargain,” says Fred Papert, the corporation’s president. “Salary was not of grave concern to him. He knew his way around the city. He’s unpredictable in a good way. He was both orderly and passionate-a rare combination.”

Kennedy entered law school that fall. The following summer, he worked for William Bradford Reynolds, the Reagan Justice Department’s civil-rights chief, making $358 a week as one of seven interns. Last summer, his salary improved when he became a $1,100-a-week summer associate at Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg & Phillips, a Los Angeles law firm with strong connections to the Democrats, and worked for his uncle Ted’s lawschool roommate, Charlie Manatt.

* * *

At last summer’s Democratic Convention, major speakers chose the people who would introduce them. Ted Kennedy asked, and John was delighted. So was a party that was “trying to reach out to the younger boomer crowd,” according to a Democratic National Committee official. Backstage, John “was nervous as hell,” reports an observer. He needn’t have worried. “Stars are born at conventions,” the official says. “He certainly came out as a Democrat everyone will be watching for a long time.”

Does John want that? Friends and former employers say that he seems committed to some kind of public service. “He has a great way with people,” says Andrew Cuomo. “He’s as comfortable with homeless kids in a playground as he is at the Democratic Convention, and that’s truly a gift.” In between law classes, he works with Cuomo’s HELP program, the Fresh Air Fund, the Kennedy Library, and the Kennedy Foundation’s associate trustees. The foundation is behind his latest project: working with the City University of New York on a plan to assist the mentally handicapped. “He’s not doing it to get recognition,” says Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, who is working with John. “He’s a real mensch.”

His enthusiasm falters, it seems, only in academia. One of his NYU professors judged him “unremarkable. Given the opportunities offered someone so blessed, one would have wanted him to give more evidence of ambition, drive, and vision. But maybe my course didn’t inspire him.”

Kennedy has apparently found something to inspire him in criminal law. And it isn’t really surprising that a man whose father and uncle were both murdered should choose to become a prosecutor. The A.D.A.’s job is “tough work,” says his law school friend Stevelman. “It takes someone who really wants to get down and deal with real people’s needs. I don’t think John likes things easy or false.”

“His interest in criminal law is marketable and useful,” adds a fellow law student. “He’s not doing it for money reasons. He’s very curious. He’s interested and open. He’s much more comfortable with black people, for instance, than your average kid of his world.”

Before John ever appeared at the Brooklyn Family Court as a student lawyer, Joseph A. Esquirol Jr., the supervising judge, worried that the court would come to a stop. He recalls thinking that “every woman will leave her desk to come see him. “I couldn’t have that,” Esquirol says, so he called his court staff together. “Don’t make it any worse for him,” he told them. “Try not to drool till he’s gone. I want to give the young man a chance to grow in his profession. He has a right to that.”

* * *

Drooling stenographers aren’t the only obstacle Kennedy faces. “How would you feel, if you were a thirteen-year-old arrested for a chain-snatch, if the son of a president was your lawyer?” asks Esquirol, who has presided over three designated-felony cases in which Kennedy appeared. Says a fellow law student, “[Who he is] comes up all the time. John presses it away and goes on.”

NYU officials and teachers will not discuss Kennedy’s grades, but Esquirol gives him high marks. “I don’t know that he’s the best or the worst,” the judge says. “I don’t envy him one minute. I think he can cut it if he’s allowed to practice without pressure. He’s got the innate common sense, ability, anti presence. He knew what he was doing and why he was doing it.” Esquirol pauses. “If I was a father, I wouldn’t be disappointed to have him as a son.”

John’s work with the underprivileged and disabled, his experience bridging the public and private sectors, his inquisitive mind, sense of obligation, and determination to avoid the obvious, a quick run for elective office, reveal a commendable sense of purpose. “He makes good decisions, not facile ones,” says Stevelman. “He makes a point not to make broad decisions about life.” It’s not that he won’t want our votes eventually. He just doesn’t want them now, when all he would be is JFK II. But John F. Kennedy Jr. will always be America’s son, and that’s a hurdle he’ll face for the rest of his life. “I honestly think,” says one friend, “in 100 years, they’ll say that whatever he did, he succeeded not because he was John F. Kennedy Jr. but in spite of it.”.

©1989 Michael Gross

That four letter word starts flying out of Linda Stein’s mouth the moment she walks into Coco Pazzo.

“Where have you been?” asks the maitre d’.

“F — you,” says Stein.

Working the dining room from the minute she enters, Stein makes her first stop at the table where Bob Krasnow, the chairman of Elektra Entertainment, is sitting with Michael Klenfner, a powerful music consultant, and MTV CEO Tom Freston. “Meine Yiddishe mama,” Klenffier calls her. Linda glows. It’s her kind of table.

Stein is known to tabloid readers as the “realtor to the stars” at Douglas Elliman and best friend of Sylvester Stallone’s and Elton John’s. But she used to be in the music business, and she recently returned part time, managing a Danish rapper named Lucas. So Stein falls easily into in crowd joking about an upcoming bash for the chairman of the MCA Music Entertainment Group. “Is this the Al Teller dinner?” she asks. “Thirty five thousand dollars a table?”

“Twenty eight thousand,” Krasnow replies.

“I must have the wrong charity,” says Stein, waving good bye.

Moments later, Allen Grubman, the big shot music business lawyer, walks in to join yet another record company executive. “Grubman,” Linda mutters darkly. She says that he’s her only enemy. She’ll tell me why but only after this article is published.

Catching a wisp of the conversation at Krasnow’s table, she can’t help picking at the scab: “Grubman walks in, they use my line on him.” A pause. “They stole my line.” Another pause. “Those f — ers.”

“Linda?” someone at our table suggests. “You say f — a lot.”

“When I see this many people in the record business in such a small radius, it’s hard to stay a lady,” Stein says.

“You should have heard her on the phone the other day,” chimes in her sixteen year old daugh ter Mandy, who’d gotten stuck in East Hampton during Hurricane Bob a few weeks ago. “She goes, ‘This is Linda. This is totally f — ed. It’s a f — ing hurricane. Get the f — out of there.’ ” Mandy sighs. “If she doesn’t say f — twenty times a day, she’s repressed.”

“So I say f — ,” Stein admits. “F — I can’t help it.”

She truly can’t help it. Diminutive, brassy, and caustic, Stein has a face as expressive as her truck driver’s mouth. Everything about her is too much, from her too high Manolo Blahnik heels to her too short Gianni Versace skirts. Yet somehow it all works for her. Without looks or money, through the sheer force of her often abrasive personality, the fortyish Linda Stein has become a player. She makes an imposing splash in the social swim.

She’s a complicated woman, full of conflict and contradictions. One movie star who knows Stein well is said to have called her “Buddy Hackett with tits” -behind her back. Others refer to her “power envy,” pushiness, and name dropping. “She wants desperately to be in the thick of things,” says one person who’s watched her in action. But even Stein’s detractors admit that they have a soft spot for her, that she’s immensely human. If anything, she’s too open about her problems. “Her nerve is beyond anything,” one longtime observer says, laughing. “You can’t help but admire her.”

Nerve may well be a necessary for survival now that the bubble has burst in the real estate market. Last month, Stein finally made her first deal since March -and Elliman, which hired her in better times, may well expect more. Though her commissions are high, a percentage of nothing is nothing. And now, even though she says there is no connection, Stein has returned to where she started the renegade music scene. Some think that may well be where she really belongs.

Stein was born Linda Adler, the daughter of a kosher caterer in Riverdale. For a while, she was a fifth grade teacher, but that didn’t last. She soon became Mrs. Seymour Stein, wife of a promotion man turned record mogul. Then she was best known for traveling the world with her best buddy, Elton John. She also managed the Ramones, the band that inspired the British punk movement. “Stars and fifthgraders,” she says. “It’s all the same.”

In 1979, after two daughters and several years on the road, Stein got divorced and discovered real estate. A few big deals later, paparazzo Patrick McMullan dubbed her the “realtor to the stars” in a photo caption in New York Talk. The description stuck, and Stein started being linked in the columns with everyone from Attila to Madonna.

In the years since Stein launched her career in real estate, working for society broker Edward Lee Cave, she’s handled bigticket properties in New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and even Pisa, Italy, for a lot of big name, powerful people, especially actors, musicians, and entertainment executives. To be known as a “producer” or star broker like Stein, an agent needs to generate sales of at least $ 10 million a year.

Some agents go about their business quietly. Cave, Stein’s mentor, is known for his discretion. So is William B. May’s Roger Erickson, who, like Stein, is a former record executive specializing in the hippest clients and most luxurious properties. Erickson is also Stein’s closest competitor. Lately, he’s surpassed her in gross sales. “I don’t like to even acknowledge him,” Stein says a tad defensively.

She would prefer to be compared to Alice Mason, the broker who’s known for her dinner parties. But she’s quick to say, “My clients are younger.” Like Stein, Mason depends on the press. Though the media scare off some clients, they bring in listings. (A columnist publicizes the real proximity to the known, the wealthy, and the swell in exchange for exclusive gossip tidbits.)

Aileen “Suzy” Mehle has long had the exclusive on Mason; though she’s sometimes in Richard Johnson’s column, Stein appears most often in that of Billy Norwich. Stein’s clipping files include about 100 mentions since 1986, and Norwich, who just moved from the News to the Post, wrote most of them. Last year, he had twenty references to Stein; over the years, he’s mentioned her partying with Blaine, Pat, and Calvin; her working vacations in Aspen and St. Bart’s; her daughter Samantha’s “sweet sixteen”; her dinners at hot restaurants and romances with very young and handsome men. (For the record, Stein’s 1990 clips also include eight appearances in “Page Six,” two in WWD, two in On the Avenue, and one each in Vogue, the New York Observer, and New York’s “Intelligencer” column.)

As a result, some say that Stein’s an inveterate and sometimes nasty gossip who uses the columns to further her private agenda. “People are nice to her because they are afraid of her,” claims one person who knows her.

Longtime friend Danny Fields, a musicindustry veteran, dismisses such talk. “They are giving her credit for a power she doesn’t wield,” he says. “She is tempestuous, aggravating, irritating, and occasionally borders on violence; but she’s not evil.”

Stein herself will boast that daughter Mandy calls her Mrs. Grenville “because I love to be in the papers,” but she gets heated up about these charges. “Columnists call me. Yes, they call me,” she says. “I don’t take it as seriously as other people do. There’s more fire in [coop] board papers than in any gossip column. That’s when I’m playing with fire

Stein does talk. Few brokers boast the way she does. In our very first conversation, in late August, she talked about working with Stallone (who was interested in renting an apartment in Beverly Hills), a member of the Cox clan, and graphic designer Fabien Baron, who is about to go to contract on a co op.

Stallone has been a client though not a buyer for years. “You might know what to do with this person,” Cave said as he handed Sly to Stein. She proved to be a natural at sheltering and caressing the famous she found Andrew Lloyd Webber a maid and Demi Moore an acupuncturist. “She understands us,” says loan Rivers. “She knows about security, what buildings will reject us. She an incredible saleswoman. So enthused. So excited. You think, She’s right. Who needs a view? Who needs running water? Linda is a good soul in a rough business.”

But it’s dangerous out there. Stein made the front page of the New York Post and lost a clientwhen she was photographed showing co ops to Madonna, who had been rejected by the board at the San Remo. Stein got her revenge: She brokered a deal last year that put Bruce Willis and Demi Moore in a triplex in one of the San Remo’s towers (they bought the apartment from Robert Stigwood).

Stein also sold Jann Wenner the Perry Ellis townhouse for $4.2 million in 1987. She found Webber a Trump Tower duplex for about $6 million in 1988 and, in 1989, sold Calvin Klein’s bachelor pad to producer Keith Barish for $4 million (but Barish backed out of the deal, and Klein got to keep his $400,000 deposit). Stein got zilch. It was the same in 1990, when Stein brokered Klein’s East Side townhouse for $7.7 million, her buyer walked, and Klein kept $770,000. Stein has, however, done more rewarding multiple deals with Sting, Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, LaToya Jackson, and Paul Schrader and Mary Beth Hurt. Sometimes it’s like musical chairs: Sting bought from Joel. Harrison Ford bought from Debra Winger. “They’re chained,” says Stein. “That’s success in the real estate business. When one thing leads to another.”

MY CLIENTS ARE MY NEIGHbors, my old roommate, my friends,” Stein says. “My business is a continuation of my life.” Beginning with Elton John in the seventies, she’s linked up a chain of introductions that connects twenty years of stars from rock and roll low lifes to social high livers.

Today, Stein, who considers Blaine Trump one of her “real” girlfriends, bristles when people call her a groupie or a climber. She worships hip, she says. “Hip, hip, hip. I really don’t care who anybody’s grandfather is. I want to know their children. ” But in fact, she wants to know all sorts of people. “She has parlayed close relationships with powerful and famous people into a professional matrix,” Fields says. “It’s quite a modern way to work.”

This year, though, it’s been tough going. For five months, nothing moved. Stein blamed the war but admits, “You wonder, Is it me?” She put together her last big deal in March. Andy Warhol’s home was long considered overpriced at $8 million. Stein, who says she was haunted by the house, finally sold it for $3 million to “some Spaniards nobody’s heard of” But she still holds a grudge against the Warhol estate for denying her the exclusive, “which I thought was ironic, because Andy was a big fan of mine,” she says, adding a dig: “They turned down $5.5 million in 1987.”

Stein LIVES IN THE KENILWORTH, on Central Park West, where her neighbors are Bill Moyers, Michael Douglas, and Ashton Hawkins. A jeroboam of Moet sits in her hallway. The rooms are large and sparsely furnished. A suite of Empire furniture decorated with inlaid brass stars barely fills the sprawling living room, which overlooks the park. The emptiness is a reminder that, famous friends aside, Stein is, as Edward Cave once said, a not atypical “divorced New York girl selling real estate” to make ends meet.

“In a very good year, I’ll sell eleven apartments,” Stein says. And in a bad year, like this one? “I’ve sold a lot of furniture. Sometimes a bracelet. I live on the edge too much.” She doesn’t save; she has young boyfriends; and she and her ex husband are engaged in what she calls “a chronic lawsuit” over divorce terms. “It’s not pretty,” she says. “It’s hard to talk big numbers with a client while you’re looking for a twenty in your wallet.”

Still, she’s managed to hold on to small collections of statuary fragments, antique glass pieces, and the Horst, Huene, and Beaton photographs that share the redlacquered library with dozens of family pictures of her daughters, Mandy and Samantha; David Bowie; Sly, Gianni, and the rest. “That’s Boy George and Michael 1. Fox in another world at Area,” Stein says. “And there’s Bruce Willis, Elton, and Herb Ritts in Hollywood. I was on Ecstasy, I think.”

Her daughters’ rooms are down a hall, both whitewashed and covered with graffiti like DEBBIE GIBSON IS LAME and PETER IS A STUD. “It’d be a hard sell, this apartment,” Stein says, leading the way to her bedroom, with its Art Deco bed, a StairMaster, piles of Bob Dylan cassettes, and dozens of empty Chanel and Chloe perfume bottles lined up in rows like toy soldiers. Even in here, the famous names tumble out there’s the hat Versace gave her and the Paul McCartney flute that she bought at one charity auction and is now donating to another. “I saw Paul this weekend, and he loved that I was recycling. Linda gave me veggie burgers.” She picks up a copy of the Forbes Four Hundred issue. “My night table reading,” she says.

At noon, Stein heads downtown to meet Stallone, and producer Keith Barish at a press conference for Planet Hollywood. Though she’s detained at the door (“Who needs this s ?” she gripes. “I could be negotiating”), Barish quickly appears, scolding a sentry: “Linda doesn’t wait.” Later, inside a hotel suite, Stallone interrupts an interview to greet her. “Hi, angel face,” he says. “Thanks for the flowers. I ate ’em.”

Stein beams as he comes closer to bend the bill of her Planet Hollywood gimme cap. “Only a schmuck wears a bill flat,” Stallone says. “C’mon, get with the program.” Stein tells Stallone she wants him to give a quote for her profile. “Linda Stein,” he says, backing away. “America’s conduit to the stars.”

STEIN MOVED FROM CAVE TO Douglas Elliman in March 1990, after the big brokerage house was shaken up and taken over by the Milstein family. Fellow brokers from Cave say there was no rift. At Cave, she would never rise above princess. The much larger Elliman firm offered her queenly status: a 65 percent share of commissions on sales (the standard split is 50 50) a private office, a male assistant, and a chauffeured huntergreen BMW 525i with a phone. The appeal of her deal is clear from the amount of time she spends operating from her car, wheeling and dealing apartments and fielding calls from Lucas, whose album is going to be released next month. Stein figures that after he hits, she’ll sell him and the record company president apartments. She’d better. Her car phone bills run to $2,500 monthly.

Between calls, she stops at her office, which overlooks the intersection of Madison and 57th Street. “There’s never a dull moment,” says Tom Raffo her assistant, as Stein walks around, stared at by the more typical brokers, blonde women of a certain age wearing pearls and discreet print dresses.

Stein moves from ran to real estate to real life as she and Tom field phone calls from her ex husband’s secretary; Blaine Trump (“She’s such a nice girl”); an estate owner in Antigua (“Tell him to send a plane ticket”); a condominium buyer (“Cross your fingers it’s never in the bag”); and the agent for a Fifth Avenue apartment seller who wants Stein to reimburse him for the time his maid spent waiting for a “very big movie star” client who never turned up.

“I’ll pay the maid,” Stein screams into the phone, “but I won’t bring [the very big movie star] to his apartment.” She slams down the phone. “F them,” she yells at it. A few hours later, the agent calls back to apologize. “I don’t have to pay the maid,” she cracks victoriously. “Good. Let’s go to Tiffany.”

But instead, she heads crosstown to Uptown Records, where she’s meeting with president Andre Harrell about Lucas. As Harrell speaks to an enthusiastic record plugger on his speakerphone, Stein boogies in her chair her extrashort Versace skirt hiking up her thighs. Lucas’s first single is called “Show Me Your Moves.” Stein’s aren’t bad, either. “I’ve had this contract six weeks and I can already speak hip hop,” she confides as she leaves the building. “And I can make these boys laugh, too, ’cause I’m crazy large.”

BORN IN MANHATTAN, LINDA ADLER GREW UP in Riverdale, a self described “color coordinated, obedient, B plus public school student.” But her junior prom date, Elliot Roberts, who now manages musicians like Tracy Chapman and Neil Young, remembers their days together hanging out in the parking lot at Jahn’s ice cream parlor. “She was a pushy teen, but very funny,” he says. “She went with a quarterback. She was a rebel, a wild little girl. We thought of her as Fast Linda.” Asked for his prom memories, he laughs and says, “Cleavage. She had it. She showed it.”

She loved dancing to rock and roll and won a spot gyrating on a fifties TV show. Even after she earned a master’s degree in education and started teaching in the Bronx in the sixties, music remained in her blood. “I used Simon and Garfunkel in creative writing class,” she says, “and I used to go to Arthur every night and dance.” In 1969, she went to Paris for a year, learned French, saw rock shows, and sold clothes in a boutique. Back in the Bronx, she met Seymour Stein, who’d recently founded Sire Records, on a blind date. Six weeks later, in San Francisco, where one of Sire’s bands was playing, they met Reg Dwight, who would become famous as Elton John.

BY THE MID SEVENTIES, Stein was pregnant and working for Sire, and all of them especially Elton were rich beyond their dreams. “Seymour turned Elton on to buying valuable things, as opposed to boots,” Stein says. “I did a lot of bidding at auctions for him. He became a major consumer. I had a very glamorous life.” She was onstage when Elton played Dodger Stadium, at his side when he dined with Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon at Kensington Palace. There were also “decadent moments,” she says slyly. “We had a terrific time.”

Two years later, Stein saw the Ramones at the suggestion of Fields, then a rock journalist and manager. They’d met when Fields was the editor of 16. “1 was told to get to Linda if I wanted to get to Elton,” Fields says, chortling. “I had a picture of her with him, so I ran it with a caption that said something like ‘Unspeakably rich, immensely popular Linda Stein accompanies Elton John.’ ” Needless to say, Stein liked it, and the pair have been friends ever since. Fields was attracted by her “ferocious spirit and indomitable energy,” he says, adding with another laugh, “There’s more energy there than most people care to deal with and more honesty than most people care to confront. There’s too much to deal with, perhaps. She’s never opted for bland situations.”

Certainly, the Ramones were anything but bland. Sire signed them, and when their first album was released, in 1976, Fields invited Stein to co manage them. Soon after the birth of her second daughter, she hit the road with the band. “That’s when my independence started and my marriage was very much falling apart,” she says. “That period was a little wild.” One night, Samantha Stein woke up to find Iggy Pop rolling joints on the living room floor. And that was normal.

By the turn of the decade, the Steins had divorced, the Ramones had left for greener management, and Linda was doing the disco scene at Studio 54. Meanwhile, the girls were growing up, Stein says, “and I had to find something to do.” She’d been free lancing as a consultant in the music business, but her course was set when she earned a finder’s fee for bringing her ex husband’s apartment to Edward Lee Cave, a former auctioneer then heading Sotheby’s real estate arm. “I saw that there was money to be made,” she says. When Cave set out on his own, Stein got a license and asked for a job.

“The next morning, I was in the office,” she says. But not for long. She spent her first days as a broker walking the East Side, memorizing buildings and addresses. “The beginning was tough, and then it all seemed to come together. I made lists; I went out; I told people I sold real estate. It was awkward, and then it just started to snowball. I knew a lot of people when I started, and I kept getting referred and referred and referred. Deals bring deals.” A corollary to that rule is that “press brings press,” she adds. “I’ve cultivated it. I’m an invention of the press.” But she hasn’t bothered cultivating relationships with Manhattan’s tougher co op boards.

“My clients are my friends,” she howls. “I won’t walk into a lobby where they don’t want people of my ethnic background, so why would I bring my friends there? We’re of the same ilk. Nobody wants to be rejected.”

STEIN’S PART TIME RETURN TO THE music industry coincided with the recent slump in the real estate market. She insists she has time and energy enough for both jobs. Her daughters are rarely at home anymore. Samantha is starting college. Mandy is at boarding school. “My daughters, who mean more to me than anything in the world, need to be away from me more than they need to be with me; I need to be productive; I don’t want to feel like I’m lonely or like I’m losing something; and I’m loving what I’m doing,” Stein says in one breathless sentence. “I love doing deals.”

The entire day before, she had been on the phone making offers on an East Side condominium for Women’s Wear Daily executive Patrick McCarthy. As she talks, she faces a wall decorated with clippings about herself. The most recent only a few days old is from Women’s Wear Daily. McCarthy’s phoned in bids on the apartment inch up in $5,000 increments all day long. “He’s listening to a committee,” Stein mutters darkly after failing to persuade him to make a bolder final bid. When she leaves the office for the day, she still doesn’t know if she’s got a deal.

It is almost noon the next day when Mandy Stein interrupts our interview to tell her McCarthy’s bid has been accepted.

“Wooooooooooo,” Stein cries. It is a long keening sound that makes my tape recorder’s speaker crackle and sputter as I play it back. “Awwwwwwwwww.” Linda runs around the room, kisses Mandy three times, and spins like a top. “Ooooomigod! Ooooomigod! You don’t understand. It’s beyond the money. It’s the ego, too. You don’t know what it is to not do a deal for a long time. I can’t remember the last deal I did. Woooooooooooo.”

She falls back on the couch, already reaching for the phone. “We got a deal,” she tells McCarthy proudly. “We’re rolling. Now what I think we’re supposed to do is keep our big mouths shut.”

©1991 Michael Gross

WHEN JON PODELL BECAME EXECUTIVE VICE-PRESIDENT AND WORLDWIDE HEAD of music at ICM, the mega-agency, last year, he regretfully informed the decorator working on his spacious 57th Street office that he wouldn’t be hanging any gold or platinum records there. During his 27 years in the rock business, Podell had collected dozens of the coveted commemorative discs, markers of his status as rock-and-roll royalty. But Podell’s gold records are now gone, along with many of his other most personal possessions. “I don’t know. I lost them,” he sighs. “My Coca-Cola-memorabilia collection-I don’t know where it went. My pocket-knife collection that my father started when I was 9 I sold for half a gram of coke in a crack house on 78th Street.”

Jonny Podell was once the hottest agent in rock, a lunatic legend as large as Keith Moon with a taste for drugs said to rival that of Keith Richards. But ten years later, Podell hit bottom-divorced, homeless, and cross-addicted to heroin, crack, Dilaudid, Valium, and a virtual pharmacopoeia of exotic uppers and downs. We’ve been talking about his astonishing comeback for several days. “I’m a guy that is very, very, very, very, very grateful,” he says in a stone-washed whisper. “I had nothin’. Nothin’. I lost almost everything.”

Since then, Podell has slowly been crawling back to the top. It wasn’t too long ago that he was assumed dead and ICM’s share of the concert-booking business was dying, eaten up by CAA and other rivals. But then Podell came onboard, breathing new life into the firm and wooing performers away from the competition. International Creative Management now represents acts from the Butthole Surfers to Michael Bolton. And after a decade in the desert, Podell is once again a kingpin; if you’re playing clubs and dreaming of stadiums, he’s the man to see. In the harshly competitive music business, he ranks as one of the three most powerful agents. “Jon is the finest agent in the history of rock and ,roll,” gushes Phil Walden, the legendary founder of Capricorn Records. But Podell is more than just another high-profile drug casualty: In a business that’s no stranger to self-destruction, he’s the ultimate rock-and-roll revival act, a rare happy ending.

* * *

ON A BALMY SPRING AFTERNOON, THE RESURRECTED superagent is sitting in his office, with its mahogany blinds, chocolate-brown leather furniture, and green granite desk, covered with stacks of contracts for his personal clients-George Clinton, the Gypsy Kings, Alice Cooper, the Allman Brothers, Erasure, Love Spit Love. Podell’s a flurry of nerves, simultaneously chain-smoking a pack of red Marlboros, chomping gum, doing arithmetic in his head, and yammering impressive numbers into the phone (“On a 90-10 we could make a million seventy-four”) while giving “face time” to one of the twenty booking agents he supervises (“Rent? Capacity? Split? Commissions?”) and jotting down notes in a hand as wired and spindly as Jonny himself.

At 51, Podell is not quite handsome: Whippet-bodied and slightly weathered, he has thinning brown hair, olive skin, and carefully cultivated stubble. In his druggie days, what you first noticed was his eyes-magnetic and demented, they flashed and rattled like the stack of silver bracelets that decorate his arm. Nowadays, you are drawn to his smile, which can seem demented, too, until you realize his joy is genuine.

He spins around in his swiveling office chair, proudly pointing out the “stars” whose framed photos line every surface: Andy Warhol, Jimmy Carter, Lou Reed, Johnny Depp, Biz Markie (“the surprise guest at my son’s bar mitzvah,” he says), Teddy Pendergrass (“I’m bringing him back. I just got him a $400,000 book deal”). Photos of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant share shelf space with his most recent success story, David Blame, whose million-dollar ABC special-packaged by Podell and heralded by an unprecedented two months of prime-time promos — aired in May. “He doesn’t just book the deal; he makes sure it goes right,” says the 24-year-old magician, the latest in a long line of Podell’s proteges. “Jonny makes people’s dreams come true.” Podell made his first foray into the music business in 1965, scalping Beatles tickets at Shea Stadium. In the seventies, he single-handedly redefined the rock-booking business by creating the first boutique agency, toured Alice Cooper into a fortune, put Crosby Stills, Nash & Young in the Guinness Book of Records (for the then-highest concert gross of all time), and booked the first post-Beatles tour by a Beatle. But by the early eighties, he had descended into the spiral of drug addiction that would leave him destitute and suicidal. Now Podell is a man transformed — the perfect poster boy for this sober decade. “Jonny’s proved you can come back and succeed,” says music-business man Michael Klenfner. Podell appreciates the irony. After last year’s Grammy Awards, he hit a round of parties before heading home at 4 A.M. Once, he would have left with three babes on his arm and an eight ball in his pocket. Now, “walking out behind me,” he smirks, “there’s 16-year-old Bijou Phillips, 21-year-old Elijah Blue Allman, 22-year-old Sara Gilbert, 24-year-old David Blaine, and 15-year-old Cassidy Podell. My little ducks.”

* * *

I FIRST MET JON PODELL IN A BLIZZARD OF COCAINE. IN 1974, I spent several days following him around for a profile in a men’s magazine. “They’re doing my life story for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not,” he bragged. At the time, Podell was the most flamboyant agent in rock, and something of a wild man. His toothy, coke-fueled grin was a beacon that attracted people to him; his outsize generosity insured that they stayed. He was a carefully cultivated character: He delivered sexual innuendos, social slurs, and wild fabrications in a manner that combined a manic Queens patois with a flamboyant rock-star queeniness. He and his wife, Monica, were the prettiest, skinniest people on earth, swaddled in plush, pricey furs and creamy leathers. When Monica wasn’t around, other women usually were.

“He was truly a rock star, a legend,” says Alice Cooper. “We’d get up in the morning and read his reviews in the paper.” One night after an Alice Cooper concert, Podell visited Ashley’s, the Balthazar of that moment. He parked his Rolls right in front, and as a crowd gathered and a photographer furiously snapped pictures, he mounted his car like a bull, the car’s famous winged hood ornament, the Spirit of Ecstasy, sprouting between his legs. Two groupie types, decked out in trash and flash, clambered up there with him.

Podell was also on hand the night George Harrison was playing the last of three sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. Podell was Harrison’s agent, thanks in large part to Bill Graham, rock’s golden-age impresario and Podell’s professional mentor. In time, Graham also became the agent’s moneylender, his protector, and finally the leader of the intervention that freed Podell from the grip of hard drugs. That night, Graham wore a necklace with the word BAD spelled out in gold letters. Podell had one, too; his said BADDER.

I trailed Podell from the backseat of his Rolls to the bowels of the Garden. As we disembarked, the agent handed me his bulging cosmetics bag; he didn’t want to spoil the line of his skintight white suit. We went backstage. The minute Podell turned his back, a security goon was upon me; my pass wasn’t sufficient to get me into the Garden’s tightly guarded inner sanctum. I was pushed outside a velvet curtain and ordered to wait. A few minutes passed before Podell reappeared and rescued me. Twice more, the goon pushed me out; the last time, he warned the sentries they’d be fired if I got past them again.

Finally Podell summoned Graham, who squeezed my cheeks like a grandfather and shoved my head in the sentries’ direction. “You see this face?” he barked. “It stays!” Only when we were back in the Rolls after the show did I discover the reason for Podell’s intent solicitousness. The pouch I’d been holding for him contained a mountain of cocaine.

A few nights later, we were in Podell’s apartment: a plush, dark cave in the East Fifties decorated with gold records and thousands of dollars’ worth of music boxes and Coke memorabilia. We pushed an official Alice Cooper promotional cocaine mirror back and forth between us as Podell reminisced on his life up to the age of 28, the conversation punctuated by the sound of razor hitting glass and sharp sniffs.

* * *

BORN IN THE BRONX TO MIDDLE-CLASS JEWISH PARENTS, PODELL breezed through Forest Hills High, Queens College, City College, and NYU but never got his master’s degree because he neglected to write his thesis. “I was a genius,” he boasted that night. “It’s only recently that drugs dulled my brain.” In college, Podell was introduced to the music business; he worked mixers and sometimes scalped tickets. After college, he briefly taught at P.S. 17. He fell in love with a girl he met on National Boulevard in Long Beach. Monica Faust looked like a cross between Jean Shrimpton and Little Orphan Annie. She wouldn’t give him the time of day.

He got a job as a jewelry salesman. Then, hoping to meet girls, he went to work for a record plugger with the memorable moniker Morty Wax. A year later, in 1969, he got a job as an agent at Associated Booking Company (ABC), an agency that had specialized in booking rhythm-and-blues bands. As the house hippie, Podell started out with minuscule responsibility-booking “junior colleges in Providence, Rhode Island, starting with the letter W,” he joked. But by the early seventies, he was booking big rock acts like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Canned Heat. His social life improved as well. After a dogged courtship, he finally won over Monica in 1970.

Podell’s first musical coup was the Allman Brothers, whom he met at the start of their career. “At first I thought he was a little bit jive,” admits Gregg Allman. ” ‘Course, everything back then was a little overdone ’cause everybody was high as a kite. But you could see through all that to the realness behind the man.” Under Podell’s shrewd tutelage, the Allmans went from playing college dances to headlining the closing night of the Fillmore East. His next project was shock-rocker Alice Cooper, whose co-managers, Shep Gordon and Joe Greenberg, kidnapped Podell, handcuffed him in a limousine, and flew him first-class to Detroit to see their band play. “In New York, they weren’t worth $100,” Podell said, but he saw potential where others saw putridity: When Bill Graham heard Podell had signed the outre Cooper, he sent the agent a letter notable for its prodigious use of profanity.

“Jonny’s plan was to play anyplace that will have you,” says Cooper. By the time of its Billion Dollar Babies tour in 1974, the band had become one of the biggest acts in the world. At one stadium date, Podell stuffed $100,000 in cash-the night’s proceeds-in his socks. A hefty percentage of it would end up in his nose. One night, Cooper barged into a backstage bathroom where Podell was using a gold spoon to snort coke from the hollowed-out gold peanut he wore around his neck. “You’re really starting to believe this Billion Dollar Babies bullshit, aren’t you?” he snapped. “I’m surprised the coke’s not gold, too.”

Despite his excesses, however, Podell inspired intense loyalty from his bands. “It’s a camaraderie that has to do with heart and music and tragedy and overcoming tragedy and making beautiful music,” Gregg Allman says. “I love him like I did my brother Duane.” He also became a legend among the young promoters who would soon come to rule the rock roost. John Scher-now a top promoter, then a student booking shows in a Jersey skating rink-arrived at ABC’s Park Avenue headquarters one night to pick the agent up for dinner. Knocking on a half-closed office door, he accidentally pushed it open, and there was Podell, inT-shirtirt, leaning back behind a massive oak desk, wearing a big, stupid smile and moaning. “Then out from under the desk crawls this incredibly waify, supermodel-gorgeous, doe-eyed woman,” Scher marvels, laughing. “She said, `Bye, Jonny’ and we went to dinner.”

Podell quit ABC in 1972, when he started seeing Allman Brothers routing sheets in his head while making love. “In a flash of brilliance, I quit, asked Monica to marry me, and moved to an apartment that was twice as expensive, all in the same week.” He acknowledged he’d been taking psychedelic pills called `blue fucks’ every morning for some time. Alice Cooper saved the day by paying for a first-class honeymoon-and inadvertent detoxification-in Maui; as his gift, Shep Gordon offered Podell the chance to book an Alice Cooper tour for commissions that matched his salary at ABC.

Not long afterward, Podell decided to open his own booking boutique, which he named BMF, after Cooper’s description of him: “the baddest motherfucker you ever met.” Determined to run his company as a guerrilla operation, Podell refused to list BMF’s phone number, a pretense that infuriated Gordon. “I took out a full-page ad in Billboard and put his home phone number in it,” Gordon gleefully recalls.

At the time, the business was dominated by huge, bureaucratic agencies like Premier Talent and ABC. Quirky and fearless, BMF quickly shook things up. “Jon made his own rules, and the acts loved it,” says Chip Rachlin, an ICM agent at the time. “He was the first national agent. No single agent had that kind of control.” In 1974, BMF landed the Crosby Stills, Nash & Young summer stadium tour and George Harrison’s winter arena tour. In the next two years, Podell signed Lou Reed and the burgeoning Blondie. He was sitting on top of the rock world. And then his life began to unravel.

* * *

TWENTY-THREE YEARS AFTER OUR FIRST INTERVIEW, PODELL AND I meet to do another. This time the focus is drugs. Podell sampled his first joint in the sixties. He started getting high on a regular basis as a way to combat his natural reticence. “I found out the key to getting dates was drugs,” he says. “They made me older, taller, faster, sharper, better.” He first tried cocaine with the manager of one of his acts-a stretch-limo cowboy who controlled the lucrative publishing rights to early acid-rock hits and spent the proceeds on the stuff he dubbed “glow.”

By 1974, Podell was making half a million dollars a year at BMF He blew much of it on cocaine. “The clients were fucked up, the managers were fucked up, but it was tolerated,” says John Scher. “Jon got business done. Then there came a time when he couldn’t do it anymore.” Podell’s drug of choice was cocaine, with a Valium chaser. He hired seaplanes to fly his stash to Fire Island. “I was out of control,” he says. “But I was fun and people liked me, so no one wanted to confront me.” Not even Jimmy Carter. When the Georgia governor announced he was running for president, Capricorn’s Phil Walden, an early supporter, arranged a meeting with Podell. Later, the candidate complained he hadn’t understood a word the strung-out agent had uttered.

People laughed when he turned up for concerts a day early, but his life had slowly turned into a real-life version of This Is Spinal Tap-played as tragedy instead of farce. A few days before I interviewed him in 1974, he’d smashed up his Rolls and been arrested for hitting several cars and for public intoxication. Hauled before a judge, he fell down on the courtroom floor. Back in jail, he made an ass of himself. “Give us a cigarette,” he heckled the guards. “There’s no mustard on the bologna. Where’s the sugar? The cuffs are too tight. You pulled my hair.” He laughs. “I was a piece of work.”

Over the next ten years, he would be arrested at least six more times. One particularly memorable rampage began in Las Vegas, where he’d booked a series of casino gigs for Alice Cooper. After an all-nighter spiced by an encounter with several burly casino security men, Podell flew to Los Angeles to cop some heroin, then caught a plane back to New York. “I was a mess, I guess,” he says, explaining how he got into an argument with a flight attendant and a pilot, pulled out a pocket knife, and began stabbing the seat next to him. He woke up to find himself in chains at Newark airport. The charges were eventually dropped. “I didn’t do anything,” he says, smiling sheepishly. “I got mad at a seat.”

* * *

PHIL WALDEN RESPONDS WITH A LONG, THOUGHTFUL PAUSE WHEN I ask him what happened to Podell. “Peer pressure, youth, and ambition; insecurity, pain, shortcomings,” he says. Podell himself blames his troubles on fear. “I was scared,” he says. “I was having too much fun. I didn’t know how to handle it. I couldn’t have a conversation like this, so I got high. Did I stop and think, This is not normal? I knew it wasn’t normal, but I liked being different. I was invulnerable.”

His daughter, Brittany, was born in 1977. Podell claims he quit drugs while Monica was pregnant, “which meant I would only do a little coke and a little Valium and try to come home for dinner.” At the same time, the Podells bought a huge house with a swimming pool in Englewood, New Jersey. He finally had it all; unfortunately, that included impeccable sources for heroin, opium, Dilaudid, and cocaine.

By then, an era was ending. The Allman Brothers broke up as a result of drug and personality problems. Alice Cooper stopped drinking and eased out of the fast lane. Podell’s business relationship with Lou Reed-which singer Elliott Murphy described as “a marriage made in the emergency room”-flatlined. Blondie said good-bye, too. BMF went out of business soon after. “We all just faded into black,” Podell says.

Ostensibly, he was still in business, working out of his attic in Englewood, but he spent most of his time up there smoking freebase, his glass pipe burbling behind his ever-more-incoherent phone calls. Soon, he gave up the pretense of normalcy and began spending his days in New York getting high. Though he’d head back to Englewood at 6 P.m., he wouldn’t arrive until early morning, stopping his car every few feet to smoke more freebase, “ducking below the dashboard, lighting the torch, paranoid-`What if somebody sees me?’ ” he says.

One morning at 4 A.M., somebody did. Podell was inching through Englewood when a patrol car suddenly pulled up behind him. “It’s like a movie,” he remembers. “I’m dead. I start to drive. I do a series of right turns to put my car out of their vision. It’s a lot of paraphernalia involved-you got a pipe, you got a torch, you got lighters, you got stirrers, you got shakers — it’s making martinis. With each right turn, I open the door and drop a little more paraphernalia, the stirrer, the pipe, the coke. There’s four cars behind me. There’s sirens. There’s a car on every corner in front of me-eight [police cars].” A moment later, he was lying facedown on the pavement with a bloody nose and a broken rib. “I can only think of Monica killing me,” he says, “killing me!” When he called his wife from jail, she slammed down the phone.

His friends began to grow alarmed. “I heard rumors,” says Walden. “We had a meeting and Jonny literally couldn’t talk. His motor system was in disarray” Walden staged an informal intervention and persuaded Podell to enter a clinic in Georgia. But the rehab didn’t take. “I was petrified,” Podell says. “Am I going to become the hole in the doughnut? I thought I’d lose my personality. You’re so sure it’s all fueled by heroin and cocaine.”

Soon after he emerged from rehab, Walden made him a partner in Paragon, the booking agency he co-owned in the South. Podell opened a New York branch. But every morning before work, he would withdraw $200 from a cash machine to score some smack. Soon, Paragon New York went broke and shut down. Podell left Monica, tried unsuccessfully to kick heroin alone in a 53rd Street studio, attempted rehab again, and moved back home. Cassidy was born in 1981. “We hoped that would straighten me out,” Podell says. “But it didn’t. It didn’t.”

His world grew smaller. The few friends who didn’t shun him were as messed up as he was. “Both our drug use got out of hand,” says Walden. “Our relationship was very strained. Then I fell off the edge of the world and disappeared.” The two rarely spoke again until the late eighties, when Walden joined a recovery program, too.

Podell got another job, with an agent named Norby Walters, but he was still scary, thin, and hyper. “He unraveled right in front of my eyes,” says Ron Stone, a notable rock manager who remained a friend. “He went from a brilliant, positive life force into a disastrous human being. He’d show up at my house in Laurel Canyon at all hours to borrow money, and I wouldn’t see him again for months.” One day Walters caught Podell shoving drug toys into his desk drawer. “What was that?” he demanded. “Never mind,” Podell answered. “I quit.”

Finally, he had only one client left-the Psychedelic Furs. “The manager calls every day” Podell says, “and I cannot pick up the phone. I get some courage, I calm down, I take another hit, it gets me paranoid, 1 can’t pick up the phone. I’m driving into New York every day, freebasing, can’t come home. Finally, he goes, `Jonny, we have to let you go.’ That was the end.” Podell’s marriage crumbled. He finally left for good at the end of 1982.

Podell spent the next year moving in and out of friends’ houses. When his contacts ran out, he slept in his car, trading his possessions for drugs or borrowing money from a shrinking circle of friends. For a time, he crashed on a couch on West 98th Street, owned by two star-struck musicians from Chile. “I’d con somebody out of a couple hundred bucks, freebase all night, and finally get to sleep.” he remembers. “I was only clear when I’d get up in the morning. I could feel my energy being drained. I’d sit there morning after morning and say to myself, `I can’t do this anymore. Stop or kill yourself. OD or suicide.’ And then I’d see my kids in school, with somebody walking down the hall behind saying, `His dad OD’d,’ or `Her dad committed suicide.’ Over and over again.”

Soon, Podell had even run out of friends to get high with. He started carrying all his paraphernalia with him in a cosmetics case; he’d ask dealers to let him smoke on the spot. One night in 1983, he flagged a cab outside a crack house at 5 A.m. The driver sped to a remote, secluded clearing where he and a confederate grabbed Podell’s last valuables, beat him and left him bleeding in the street. “I felt like a cockroach,” he says. “I had no money, I had no anything. That was the bottom.”

* * *

TWO YEARS HAD PASSED SINCE PODELL’S SPLIT WITH MONICA. He was despondent and close to the breaking point when a friend from the music business threw him a lifeline. “She told me, `I’ll feed you, you can use my phone, you can have your friends over, you can even get high.’ ” In exchange, she demanded $3,000 and a promise that Podell would see a psychiatrist, which she’d pay for with his money. “I said I didn’t have it,” he recalls. “She said, `You always find money for drugs. You need help. You’re going to lose your kids.’”

As low as he sank, however, Podell never abandoned his children. “There was no time when we didn’t see him,” Brittany says. “He was always together enough to play some part.” It was on such a visit, under Monica’s wary supervision, that he received a serendipitous call from a friend in Alcoholics Anonymous, inviting him to a meeting.

The call proved to be a turning point. Slowly Podell set about patching his life together. His sister suggested he sell clothes at Charivari, where he was once a regular customer. But Podell didn’t want anyone to see him. “So we agreed I’d be a box boy at the Red Apple on 98th and Broadway,” he says. “It was far enough away that nobody was going to see me.” Presented with a job application, Podell crumbled. “I had forgotten how you live, brush your teeth, go to work,” he says. Then a friend spotted a want ad: “Young, intelligent, motivated sales people wanted.” The next day Podell met Pam Hum, a young entrepreneur who was looking for people to sell her novelty “massage” pillows (she later became the third wife of Tonight Show sidekick Ed McMahon). “I went door-to-door,” Podell recalls. “First day I make $6. Second day, $12. Third day I make no dollars. Fourth day I make $40 and I go, `Look out, God! Here I come!’”

Soon, Hum had made Podell her manager. They rode the bus home together every night. She gave him motivational books to read; today he passes them out to his ICM staff. “I knew he was special, and I told him he was destined to do wonderful things,” she says.

In fact, he started almost immediately, as Steven Tyler, lead singer of Aerosmith, can attest. Tyler and Podell first met in the seventies. “I can’t say that I partied with him or copped from him or gave him drugs; I just remember meeting him,” Tyler says. Their next encounter was more memorable: In 1984, a surprised Tim Collins, Aerosmith’s then-manager, ran into Podell in a club and asked, “You’re still alive?” The agent’s answer kicked off a series of events that ended with all the members of the band getting clean and sober together. Though rumors have surfaced recently that Tyler is using again, the singer angrily denies them. “The five members of Aerosmith have ten-plus years sober,” Tyler says firmly. “Thanks to Jonny Podell.”

* * *

PODELL WAS A NEW MAN. BUT NOT FOR LONG. LATER THAT YEAR, after a promising $2 million business deal went bust, he landed back in rehab. When he got out, he found it impossible to land a job. In desperation, he called his old friends George and Charlie Fina, who’d inherited Michael C. Fina, the silver-and-jewelry company, where he’d worked after college. “Everyone in show business was fed up with him,” says George Fina. “But I believed he was going straight.” The Finas let Podell open a corporate sales department, which crafted awards for organizations. The first client he went after was the MTA, which was soliciting sealed bids for safety awards. “I not only got the job — eleven years later, Fina still has it and they’ve made over $3 million,” Podell says. “I started getting my confidence back.”

Increasingly, he became restless to get back into the music business. In the summer of 1985, he got his chance. Willard Alexander, an agency that made its name booking the big bands, asked Podell to start up a new contemporary-music department-a $50,000-a-year job. “Alice Cooper shows up,” Jon says. “He’s sober. I’m his agent. I sign the Beastie -Boys, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I still had it.” Unfortunately Willard Alexander didn’t. In 1988, the struggling agency went bankrupt. Podell panicked, but once again, Bill Graham rode to the rescue. Mick Jagger wanted to tour South America. Graham convinced him that Podell, who’d booked Brazil for Alice Cooper, was the man for the job.

Podell flew to Rio to meet with promoters and corporate sponsors. On arrival, he called AA for an English-language meeting schedule. Come on Thursday, they said. “Unfortunately I called on Sunday and a funny thing happened on my way to the meeting. I saw a beautiful girl. I asked if I could buy her dinner. She explained she was a prostitute, do I want to party? And I said, `Can you get me some coke?’ ” He ended up cooking up batches of freebase cocaine in his hotel room. He even excused himself from a meeting with the president of an ad agency and returned 45 minutes later, drenched in sweat. Luckily, he ran out of money and called several friends in New York asking for some. Tim Collins said he’d get some money-but only if Podell came back to New York.

The homecoming wasn’t sweet; shortly after he arrived, his fed-up girlfriend broke up with him. Soon, Cassidy Podell was telling his sister, “I think something’s wrong with Dad again.”

Finally, a couple of friends from AA broke down his door and dragged him to a meeting. Several days later, he was shakily dressing for a wedding when his ex-girlfriend summoned him. Unbeknownst to Podell, she had contacted Collins-who was in a meeting with Bill Graham at the time-and together, they hatched a plan for an intervention. They had rehearsed for days, and now each person addressed Podell in turn. Graham spoke last. “I will always be your friend as long as you seek help. If not, you can just throw out my number.”

As far as Jonny was concerned, this was ridiculous; he’d been straight for the better part of four years. “After each person gives their speech, I go, `Fuck you, I don’t need you.’ I was consumed with hate,” Podell says. “But after eight of them, I’m running out of friends.” The group appointed Graham to finish up because he was the only one who could close this deal. It still wasn’t easy. They insisted that Podell go straight into rehab in Reading, Pennsylvania. He wouldn’t leave without seeing his children.

“I say to my kids: `Can I talk to you guys?’ ” Podell says. “Britt sits down. Cass is playing video games. `Listen, while I was in Brazil, I started using drugs. If I’ve been acting funny, that’s why. My friends have kind of interrupted and feel that I should go get help. I’m going to take their advice. I’m sorry if you’re, y’know, disappointed.’ Everybody’s crying. Britt’s crying, Monica is crying, Cass is playing video games, I’m crying, and off I go.”

When he got to rehab, there was a letter waiting from Steven Tyler, who was honeymooning in Bora Bora. “So,” it began, “you got caught with yo’ knickers down … I heard about your journey to Brazil … We have to get you a leash, boy. You almost lost it all this time … But you are the miracle that made me a miracle. Can you dig that? You saved my life … I was sinking like a rock. Now I’m rising like a rock star … You like me have got more people that love you and would do anything for you on your side, now do for yourself … ”

* * *

ONCE AGAIN, PODELL CAME BACK, WITH A little help from his friends. A colleague from Willard Alexander arranged a job for him at an agency named Variety. “They were willing to gamble I could keep it together,” he says. “I’d slipped, but I was on the path.” Then several more friends conspired to bring him back into the big leagues at William Morris. “We vouched for Jon and said, `This is somebody we want,’ ” says Ron Stone, whose management company represented several acts at Morris. “My faith was not misplaced.” He landed a job at William Morris soon after.

For Podell, corporate life was not easy. He took it “a day at a time, learning how to do it, forgetting to return my associates’ calls, not putting who’s more important’s name first [on memos]. It was a struggle.” But there were also perks: a new girlfriend-a model-and a new apartment with a terrace and a bedroom for the kids.

By 1989, Podell had been promoted to director of East Coast contemporary music. One of his first moves was to persuade Dickie Betts and Gregg Allman, the surviving stars of the defunct Allman Brothers Band, to put aside years of drugs, drink, and managerial differences and reform their band. This spring, the Allman Brothers Band was the No. 5 touring attraction in America. “He kept checkin’ on both of us and gettin’ us to check on the other until we both realized that the closer we stick together, the better off we are,” Allman says.

By the early nineties, Billboard was lauding Podell for rebuilding the lucrative concert business at William Morris. In the fall of 1994, ICM came courting with an offer to double Podell’s salary. He defected soon after, taking over ICM’s New York music division during a particularly troubled period at the agency. “ICM had taken a beating over the years,” says Bob Grossweiner, New York bureau chief of Performance magazine. “[It was] a sinking ship that was hemorrhaging clients because its top agents were feuding and refused to speak to each other.” Six months later, Podell lured Michael Bolton away from CAA.

Last June, after he was promoted to worldwide head of music, Podell vowed to make ICM No. 1 in music again-a position it hasn’t held in years. Since then, he’s pursued his goal with typical singleminded zeal. Podell has personally signed George Clinton, Bijou Phillips, Billy Idol, and Meat Loaf, and other ICM agents have landed Rod Stewart, L.L. Cool J, Julio Iglesias, Willie Nelson, and Michael Flatley, whose Lord of the Dance show is now the top-grossing touring act in America. At the same time, Podell has broadened ICM’s touring roster to include non-rock acts with broad-based appeal like David Blaine, “reinventing himself and ICM,” as John Scher puts it. Now, finally, he has the confidence to take a shot at his own dream: being the biggest-if not the baddest-again. “Tom Ross [Podell’s counterpart at the No. 1 music agency CAA] started out the same time I did,” Podell says. “He didn’t take a detour like I did, so all things considered, I’m doing good. I haven’t lost my enthusiasm, my energy, my heart, my memory. I never thought I could catch him.” The grin. “I can catch him now.”

* * *

TIME AND AGAIN AS WE TALKED, PODELL SPOKE OF HIS children as the one thing in his life that prevented him from falling into the abyss. The turnaround for him was a Thanksgiving night soon after his umpteenth “recovery” when a skeptical Monica allowed the kids to sleep over at Podell’s home-a roach-infested apartment on Third Avenue with mattresses on the floor. He woke up in the middle of the night and suddenly knew he would make it. “The kids are asleep and I wake up and I can’t believe that I have them,” he says. “I’m sober, people like me again, my life is filled, and I just start to cry. I had averted the disaster. I didn’t die. That Thanksgiving night I’ll never forget.” Since then, Podell has tried not to look back. “From this point forward, I always need to give back,” Podell says, “’cause the miracle has already happened, I had my life restored, and I was restored, as they say in AA, to sanity. I’m not ashamed of where I’ve, been; I’m very fortunate that I was able to come back from that and establish a life. And you know it’s all by the grace of God. God’s grace. There is no other way to explain how something like this happens,” he says, happily surveying his plush domain. “‘Cause I’m not that smart. And I ain’t that good-looking.”

©1997 Michael Gross

LATE IN FEBRUARY, HOLLY SOLOMON, THE ART DEALER, gave a dinner in her 57th Street apartment after a Nicholas Africano opening. Her art-and-objet-filled rooms teemed with collectors, dealers, artists, and friends who quickly formed small clusters, drinking white wine and balancing plates of pasta on their laps.

William Wegman, a rumpled man with a mop of soft brown hair lightly streaked with gray, stood a little apart from the others. He would have seemed just a regular guy had it not been for the stunning brunette on his arm. An artist, of course, Wegman is best known for the 20-by-24-inch Polaroid photographs he has taken of his weimaraners Man Ray and Fay Ray. So it was fitting that the first fan to approach him at Solomon’s was a West Highland terrier.

Did the dog want an audition? A treat? A free print? She gave Wegman a comehither look, but he would have none of it. Looking down with an affectionate scowl, he said, “Don’t even think about it.”

* * *

WILLIAM WEGMAN’S DOG DAYS ARE OVER. His dog photos are selling better than ever-from $6,000 apiece for the new Polaroids to $20,000 for earlier ones of Man Ray. Prices for the paintings he’s been making since 1985 have hit the $100,000 mark. His time is filled with interviews and invitations. His second major retrospective of photographs, videos, drawings, and paintings (at the Whitney Museum of American Art through April 19) is drawing large, enthusiastic crowds: 60,000 since the exhibit opened in January after a tour of Europe and several American cities.

Though the popular poster and T-shirt that accompany the Whitney exhibition feature the weimaraners, the show is much broader. At 48, Wegman has survived the Vietnam-era draft, a first brush with fame, a risky dalliance with cocaine and Old Crow, and even his seemingly inescapable association with charismatic canines, to reach, in his maturity, a career peak. Already known as an artist’s artist, Wegman is now positioned for wider recognition. The 27 paintings on display at the Whitney stake his claim.

They are strikingly different from the neo-expressionist canvases by Schnabel, Salle, Chia, and Clemente that revived painting in the late seventies and early eighties. Bursting with narrative, steeped in Americana, Wegman’s latest canvases (added since the show opened in 1990 at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne) more than match the power of the twenty years’ worth of dog work that first caught the public eye.

Wegman seems to have a new idea every day. “At this point, New York has lots of artists in mid-career repeating themselves ad infinitum,” says one of his dealers, Angela Westwater. “It is such a testimony to Bill that he’s able to push himself into new work-and invest mediums he’s used before with new energy and insight.”

“He’s so prolific, it’s unbelievable,” adds his Polaroid dealer, Peter MacGill. “His videos are on Sesame Street, he’s shown in the best galleries in the world, he’s in the collection of virtually every museum, some of the most important critics cherish his work, and so does my fouryear-old. It’s amazing to see his breadth of appeal without compromise.”

“He’s one of the great artists of the latter part of the century,” concludes Holly Solomon, a Wegman supporter since 1971. “He symbolizes the range of possibility. He opened areas for everyone.”

But Wegman’s protean talent has also worked against him. He doesn’t make money like a Salle, a Bleckner, or a Schnabel, who’ve been painting steadily for years. A critical consensus is building, but unfortunately, Wegman is “becoming famous during one of the worst recessions we’ve been in,” he says. “If I’d peaked in ’88, I’d be wealthy.” Nonetheless, he knows his Whitney retrospective is a watershed. “I can see that, yeah,” he allows nervously. “Now the problem is sorting out the options.”

* * *

THE VAUDEVILLIAN’S WARNING NEVER TO follow a dog act has a certain application to Wegman. Man Ray, who died in 1982 at twelve, was a blue-gray purebred, eager to work and to please, and blessed with his breed’s ability to hold point and other poses. Man Ray’s collaboration with Wegman resulted in memorable photographs and videos-works that, as the artist puts it in his most distilled statement of purpose, “burn in.” In the video Milk/Floor, for example, Wegman crawls on all fours away from the camera and disappears around a corner, spitting a line of milk as he goes. A second later, Man Ray turns the corner, licking up the milk trail until his black nose bumps the camera’s lens.

Fay Ray followed Man Ray and gave birth to Wegman’s latest dog, Battina (a.k.a. Batty), and seven other puppies. Documenting the Rays has in a sense been Wegman’s day job since the seventies. At the same time, without the dogs, he’s produced conceptual and altered (cut-up or drawn-on) photographs and line drawings-all invested with his signature drollery. The new paintings, with their paired themes of travel and history, their epic scope, and their wide-eyed wonder, mark Wegman’s move away from dependence on the punch line. They are intimately connected to the old-fashioned American optimism that flourished during the Eisenhower years, when Wegman was a teenager. The paintings are sneakily heroic-much of their appeal lies in their rejection of pretense and bravado.

The art-world elite isn’t entirely comfortable with the mixed message put out by this shy, wry man. “The issue of humor throws a lot of people off,” says Angela Westwater. “They don’t know how to integrate it into their aesthetic.” Times critic Roberta Smith twists and turns in Wegman’s grasp. For her, despite his “growing power” and “deepening meanings,” Wegman remains “the art world’s most amusing heavyweight lightweight-and its premier dog photographer.” Says New York’s Kay Larson, “Wegman is an entertaining charmer who has the average person twisted around his little finger, but he’s not a profound or major talent.”

Wegman’s dog photographs have won praise for their pathos, ironic sophistication, gawky natvete, and telling commentaries on art, identity, metamorphosis, innocence, and sexual ambiguity. They also generate a certain uneasiness. Some wonder if Wegman abuses his dogs (he doesn’t). Others downplay his work as nothing more than an arts-and-leisuresuited version of David Letterman’s Stupid Pet Tricks (a perception abetted by Wegman, whose videos have appeared often on TV programs like Letterman’s, Saturday Night Live, and The Tonight Show).

“I don’t like to repeat myself,” Wegman has said. And “I don’t want to be known as a dog zombie.” But he knows that the dogs are winners-not only as meal tickets but also as art objects, surrogates, and muses.

* * *

WEGMAN DIVIDES HIS TIME BETWEEN a converted temple-the Center of the Proskurover Zion Congregation-in the East Village, 32 acres in upstate New York, and a restored lodge in the Maine mountains. His most recent real-estate find is a rented studio on Bond Street in NoHo. It looks like nothing so much as a boy’s bedroom-only bigger. This is a laboratory for serious silliness, from the digital loudspeakers at one end to Fay’s and Batty’s huge costume closet-cum-toy chest at the other. “Far bigger than any of our closets,” Wegman notes.

Hanging on one wall are several costumes belonging to Fay. Shelves hold the books that inspire Wegman’s paintings: The American Educators’ Encyclopedia, Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia, The Book of Knowledge, Standard Treasury of Learning, A Picture Dictionary, The Golden Book Encyclopedia of Natural Science, and an old, white-covered World Book set. A huge, unfinished canvas is pinned to another wall, a graduated blue-to-tan seascape populated with swimming things. Frames and boxes lean against it helterskelter.

Today is a photography day. Wegman is working with Fay and Batty on the first in a series of children’s books-Fay’s Favorite Fairy Tales-that he’s adapting and photographing. As Wegman leafs through his previous day’s work, the dogs sniff the floor for the dirty tennis balls hidden among the plastic reptiles, Christmas-tree icicles, tin foil, wigs, fabric swatches, pillows, drop cloths, kitschy statues and paintings, a mandolin, four buckets, and a stuffed sheep that are strewn about.

Nearby is today’s set. Cinderella’s mean attic room faces a large wooden bellows camera on wheels. It is one of only five in the world that Polaroid rents out-along with two technicians who light the sets and run the camera for $1,000 a day and $30 per exposure-to commercial clients and artists like Wegman and Chuck Close.

On a typical day, Wegman says, he’ll shoot about 60 frames, of which 5 will be usable. “The magic is me and the personality of the dogs,” he says. The work is setting up each shot, picking props, and perfecting the set. Because with Cinderella he’s telling a story for the first time, the set is more complex than usual, and setting up seems to take forever. As they work, Wegman explains his casting choices. “I play with the specific character of the dogs. From below, Fay looks like loan Crawford. She looks guilty. Fay can’t be Cinderella. Batty can be Cinderella. She can be Lolita. She’s totally trusting and innocent. There’s something eternally, everlastingly cute about her.”

Finally, Wegman hoists 65-pound Fay onto a stool and easily coaxes Batty into a bed. He dresses Fay as Cinderella’s fairy godmother, gently positions her head, grabs the shutter cord, and starts calling out, “Hey! Treat! Batty? Look here! Hoo! Hah! Stay, Fay! Don’t fidget. Good girl. Wanna go out? Wanna go to the beach?” until they offer up just the right expressions and 12,800 watt-seconds’ worth of strobe light briefly freezes their faces. Wegman’s veterinarian, Dale Rubin, here on a house call, watches from the sidelines. “They love the attention,” she says. “They love working. These are fun house calls.”

A bit later, Suzanne Delehanty, director of Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, the last stop on Wegman’s retrospective tour, drops by for lunch. They talk about how to hang his show and how the museum plans to publicize it with interviews, talks, and parties. “I’m told I’m good at that,” Wegman says.

“Is there anybody you want invited?” Delehanty asks.

“Yeah,” says Wegman. I expect him to name a collector, a De Menil or someone like that, but no. “My cousin Charlie Wegman lives there,” he says. “I was close to him when I was a little boy. When I was Billy.”

“Hey, Bill,” a camera assistant calls out. “You want to shoot some Polaroids today?”

Wegman regards him with mock scorn and says, deadpan, “He’s paid per exposure.”

Picking up a stuffed animal, Wegman heads back to work. “I’m only the stylist here,” he mutters. “I do what I’m told.”

* * *

WILLIAM WEGMAN WAS BORN IN 1943 AND grew up in a small town in western Massachusetts. A shy boy, he started drawing and painting watercolors with his mother when he was a toddler. “There wasn’t much strife that plugs into the usual artist thing,” he says. But there was life-threatening illness. In 1949, Wegman contracted Rocky Mountain spotted fever; he believes his was the first case east of the Rockies. Because they were afraid the disease was highly contagious, his parents burned all his picture and comic books-“Everything that I liked,” he says.

Wegman recovered completely and became “a good, normal kid,” he says, a hockey and baseball player who had a mutt named Wags. But just as he doesn’t exactly belong in any art category today, he didn’t fit in then, either. “I sort of dabbled with groups,” he says. “The car guys. The guys who played sports. The college-prep types. I was a little bit lost by the time I got to high school.”

Though his early work was destroyed in the spotted-fever bonfire, Wegman kept drawing throughout high school. His senior year, he needed an A after doing poorly in Latin and algebra, so he signed up for an art course. “You have talent,” his teacher said. “You should go to art school.”

“She saved my life in a way,” Wegman recalls, “because I would not have known what to do with myself.”

Moving to Boston and the state-run Massachusetts College of Art, Wegman spent his first two years under the sway of two much older roommates, both devout Roman Catholics. “We would go to four or five churches every Sunday,” says Wegman, who was raised a Protestant. “My first work had a lot of gold leaf in it. They kept me from being too normal.”

By his third year, “I was Willy Wegman-as I was called-the artist. I wasn’t lost anymore. I was interested in philosophy, music, literature, and art in an incredibly, overbearingly serious way.” He was enamored of “manifesto” art and art movements like Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism. “Every kid that painted had a little surrealist tear coming out of an eye,” he says, chortling.

To avoid the draft, Wegman enrolled in graduate school at the University of Illinois. While there, he married an undergraduate art student, and he abandoned painting in favor of spending most of his time in the electrical-engineering department. “It just seemed to make sense to align yourself with the forefront of thinking-information theory,” he says. “It seemed like a cop-out to be a potter.”

In 1967, Wegman and his wife moved to Wisconsin, where he had jobs teaching art at the University of Wisconsin’s Wausau campus and, later, in Waukesha. He began to work with fiberglass screen and also toyed with inflatable art. While renovating a house they lived in, “I attached one of my sculptures to the heating vent,” he says, “so that whenever the heat came up the whole house would fill up with this giant balloon. It would snake up the stairs.”

By 1968, “I was trying to enter new territory,” he says. “Wall art was a dirty word. It had to be mind art.” So he floated rows of Styrofoam commas down the Milwaukee River, dropped radios off buildings, and conceived a concerto for car horns.

In 1969, he got a teaching job as artist in residence at Wisconsin’s Madison campus. There, his work combined conceptual and performance elements. He attached a Magic Marker to a plank of Styrofoam and stuck it in a pail of acetone. As the plank melted, the marker drew a wavery line on his studio wall. He also began making photographs and videos. “The problem was the audience,” he says. “I had no audience other than my students.”

Beating the draft became another performance piece. Wegman spent weeks reading Borges and the Bible, then cut his hair short and smeared it with Vaseline for his physical exam. “I had a sweater with a hole in it and I kept biting my lip,” he says. “I developed really low self-esteem. I actually did go crazy, I think.”

His state of mind was reflected in his studio, where his work took a decidedly messy turn. He was working with mud, his own eyelashes, and dynamite fuses. It reminded him of when he was four years old and would make silly sounds and spin around in circles and tell himself no one had ever done that before. “I was making sounds and spinning again, and it did look interesting, but so what?”

* * *

MOVING TO CALIFORNIA IN 1970 TO TEACH at a state college in Long Beach helped resolve Wegman’s problem. “The fight was more [to learn] what you don’t want to be than what you are,” he says. “By the time I got to L.A., I had a handle on it.”

At the urging of his wife, Wegman bought Man Ray from a breeder for $35. He picked the puppy out because it was “strange and distant,” he’s said. At first he wanted to name it Bauhaus. “But he didn’t look like a Bauhaus,” he says. “He looked like a little old gray man. Then a shaft of light like a ray blasted down on him in this ordinary little duplex house and blew away the Bauhaus.” It was as if the God of Art were telling the dog, “Your name is Man Ray.” Though Wegman never planned on using Man Ray in his work, the dog kept blundering into the pieces he was making and photographing then. “The light in his eye just exploded in video,” Wegman says. “He was absolutely gorgeous in that medium, and he liked doing it.” Thus Wegman’s dog art was born.

“By this time, I hated self-indulgence,” he says. “I didn’t like whiny, narcissistic art.” His work was objective, cool, emotionless, ironic. His intention wasn’t to be funny, but “it got funny because video involves timing and surprise.” When people laughed, Wegman knew they’d gotten the idea. “It was sort of subversive and surprising,” he says. “They didn’t know there was going to be a dog coming around the corner. I could still sneak up on people then.”

This California period was paradisiacal. Wegman would fish and swim and play on the beach with his dog and his artist friends. But aside from some gallery interest in Europe and one sale of about 50 photographs to the painter Ed Ruscha for $4,400, his work still wasn’t selling. After his teaching job ended, Wegman and his wife lived on food stamps and his odd jobs.

Moving to New York in late 1972, Wegman signed with Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery, which paid him a monthly stipend of $500. As his renown grew, so did his income. Collectors like Holly Solomon started buying his work. Mick Dagger and Andy Warhol came to his shows. “For one little moment it was like what I’m going through now,” he says. But he wasn’t ready. “I just freaked out and kind of hid.”

His marriage faltered, and Wegman began spending his nights at the legendary art bar Max’s Kansas City. “I met everybody,” he says. “I was listening to real artists. Kosuth. Sonnier. They were all there. That was so exciting. But I was also starting to be rather sad.”

Wegman was an alcoholic, and in New York’s pressure-cooker art world, his drinking got out of hand. “I couldn’t handle the scene, but I was eerily drawn to it,” he says. “I was trying to be a real artist, trying to fit in.” In the process, he lost sight of himself. He and his first wife divorced in 1975, though they remain friends. Around that time, he’s said, he found himself able “to purchase expensive drugs that I could not previously afford.”

Combined with his drinking, the cocaine he began snorting had a pernicious effect on his work. “It drove me to isolate myself,” he says. His videos-which were just beginning to get wider exposure on Saturday Night Live-lost their humor. “It was like an Edvard Munch painting,” he says. “I’d go into my video room and come out screaming.” He began locking himself in his darkroom and drawing for hours at a time.

By 1978, he was married again and living in his third New York studio, on Thames Street near the Battery. Though this new stability briefly made him happier, his drugging and drinking soon escalated again. As a result, his relationship with Sonnabend deteriorated. Then the building on Thames Street burned down.

Sonnabend chose that moment to cut off his stipend (by then $ 1,000 a month). “The fire was traumatic,” Wegman says; “but I’m sure she saw me going over, the edge before that.” Leaving his second wife in New York, Wegman moved back to California late that year, took another teaching job, and fell in with a group of rock-and-roll-oriented performance artists. “It was fun,” he says, “but of course it bought right into my problem. Take coke. Get paranoid. Drink to mellow out. Fall down.”

* * *

JUST WHEN WEGMAN’S LIFE WAS SPIRALING downward, the curtain went up on the second act of his career. Ever since she’d first bought some of his early photographs, Holly Solomon had stayed a friend. In 1975, Wegman had even summered with her family in Lake Placid. Now their relationship grew closer. He left Sonnabend and signed up with Solomon’s gallery.

Back in New York in 1979, Wegman began showing at Solomon and, after initially resisting it, accepted Polaroid’s invitation to use its new large-format camera-producing his first work in color since 1966. Man Ray, who’d moped during Wegman’s hermetic phase, was delighted to go back to work. But the high life kept dragging his master down. Besides his art dealer, he also had a drugdealer who traded him cocaine for drawings. “I couldn’t function socially anymore,” Wegman says. By 1980, he was trying to stop, “but I would slip now and then,” he says. “I was always kind of sick-hung over or something-when I went to do the work.”

That work was increasingly important to him. Man Ray was ten, and Wegman knew he was starting to lose him. “That year, I used the dog a lot,” he says. But by 1981, Man Ray was on his last legs, and Wegman wasn’t doing much better. “I was a demon,” he says. His condition began to worry his friends. “There came a point when Bill had to make a decision,” says Solomon. “He had to decide to cure himself.”

Wegman entered rehab that year and emerged “liberated, healthy, spiritually awakened,” he says. Six months later, Man Ray died. “I wanted to leave my life and really start over,” Wegman says. His second marriage “didn’t survive the trauma of my recovery.”

Though Wegman was devastated by the dog’s death, his career prospered. A book of Man Ray photographs had been published in 1981, and his first retrospective was mounted the next year at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. No longer able to photograph Man Ray, he began drawing again and taking photographs of props, drawings, and people. “It was a renaissance for me,” Wegman says. “I was socially acceptable again. I started to be invited places. But everyone kept looking for the dog pictures, and they weren’t getting them.”

In the mid-eighties, Wegman got two more dogs, but one was stolen and the second died a week after he adopted it. “There was something spooky going on,” he says. “Man Ray didn’t want me to get another dog.” Meanwhile, he’d been having dreams about painting, “and the only way to find out what my paintings would look like was to start painting and see if my dreams were true,” he says.

Encouraged by Solomon and several artist friends, Wegman isolated himself in Maine, at a lakeside camp he’d first visited as a teenager, and began to paint. The first small paintings-done on birch bark-were colorful versions of his cartoonish drawings.

“When he got back from Maine, he called and said, `I think I’m painting. Will you pay for canvases?’” Solomon recalls. She did, he painted more, and she showed them in her gallery. Then she encouraged him to make larger paintings. Around the same time, the Pace/MacGill Gallery arranged to show Wegman’s new Polaroids. (Later, another gallery, Sperone Westwater, started to show some of his drawings and larger paintings.)

Meanwhile, Wegman had found another dog. He was lecturing in Memphis when a breeder asked if he’d take one of her weimaraner puppies. “I met Cinnamon Girl, which was her name,” he says, “but I really didn’t want another dog. I got on the plane, but I couldn’t get her out of my mind.” The next day, he called the breeder and she shipped the dog north. Wegman renamed her Fay Ray and within a year began using her as his new model.

Working with her gave him a sense of completion. “She was so vulnerable,” he says. “She held the page differently than Man Ray. Somehow, working with the dog changed my heart rate and made me a better painter. With the photographs, I know what I’m doing. With painting, it’s kind of unknown. Now I realize I’ll never not photograph these dogs. As long as I have one that’s willing to do it, I won’t deny myself that pleasure. I am the guy with the dog, and it would be stupid to think otherwise.”

The new balance in Wegman’s life was immediately visible in his work. The new Polaroids of the dogs began to sell for thousands rather than hundreds of dollars. With that money, Wegman bought a larger place in Maine in 1990, finally getting a studio where he could comfortably work on larger paintings. And after a few other relationships, he fell in love with the beautiful brunette, Christine Burgin, a Yale-educated dealer in conceptual art.

“I still can’t believe she’s my girlfriend sometimes,” Wegman says when she comes to the Cinderella shoot. “1 look at her … Christine Burgin.” He sounds awestruck.

As our interview ends, Wegman recalls something his roommate at art school told him twenty years ago. “He said I had this personality that waves a flag to get attention, and as soon as I do, I run and hide. I don’t need that anymore, because I’ve already got it. It’s like when you build a but in the woods. You work a lot at it, but the last thing you want to do is go and live in it. You just want to build another one.”

He doesn’t seem unhappy with his plight. Indeed, he seems like a happy guy, I tell him. “Oh, great,” he replies sheepishly, cocking his head just like a dog. Then he allows himself a little smile. “I am,” he says.

©1992 Michael Gross

THIS WASN’T the first time Henry Muller woke up on the shoulder of the information superhighway. The first time-in March of 1989, as word leaked about the secret plan to merge his employer, Time, Inc., with Warner Communications, the entertainment conglomerate-Muller, then the editor of Time magazine, was sipping a sunset cocktail at his vacation condominium in Switzerland when his boss rang to tell him the rumor was true.

Muller’s caller, Jason McManus, the editor in chief of all twenty-four Time, Inc. magazines, was the classic organization man, a thirty-seven-year Time veteran and the company’s fourth editor in chief, the latest in an orderly succession dating back to 1964, when Time’s founder, Henry Robinson Luce, stepped down. So it was seen as extraordinary that early in 1994, two full years before his contract expired and five years before mandatory retirement would have dispatched him, McManus suddenly announced that he’d had enough. He says he left prematurely for a simple reason: For the first time in seven years, nobody was hounding him. During those years, Time, Inc. had suffered an unprecedented slide that saw the company lose luster, money, employees, readers, advertising revenue, and, finally, its way altogether. After the Warner merger, power shifted from Luce’s gentlemen journalists and button-down business types to the opportunity-hungry protŽgŽs of the late Steve Ross, the master manipulator who’d built a chain of funeral parlors into an entertainment conglomerate that ultimately gobbled up Time.

Although Time bought Warner, Warner’s high-performance, high-tech ethic quickly overwhelmed its parent’s genteel pace. Time, Inc. floundered, the bad years culminating in 1992’s redesign of the flagship magazine. The bean counters were demanding a more “user-friendly” Time; McManus’s response was to appoint a committee. Muller commandeered the undertaking, bringing to life what he thought of as his dream magazine-which was ballyhooed by the business side as a rebirth but seen by outsiders (and some insiders, too) as well-intentioned but disappointing, just like the leadership that produced it. McManus started paving the way for his own exit: He promoted Muller to editorial director and replaced him with another Time, Inc. stalwart, James Gaines.

Now Muller and Gaines looked like the only serious candidates for McManus’s job. The cool, composed, Swiss-born Muller, forty-seven, started his career as a Time intern and never left, rising smoothly from the ranks of foreign correspondents. Gaines, also forty-seven, came to Time later in his career (after being fired by Newsweek) but distinguished himself in a dozen years at People, where he rose to be top editor before moving on to Life and Time.

In June, McManus told the two that they were the leading candidates to replace him. By July, insiders were handicapping the race, and even the company’s managing editors, the people who actually run People, Life, Fortune, Money, and the rest, were chasing leads like eager reporters. The first glimmer of an upset came on Thursday August 25, when outside reporters began calling in to Time. An editor in chief’s name was circulating-and it wasn’t a Time, Inc. name.

And so, once again, Henry Muller was in the Alps when his fate was sealed. He was out hiking as Friday dawned back in New York City, and his fax machine started to whir and spit out a story from that day’s Wall Street Journal. “According to people familiar with the situation,” the journal article said, “Norman Pearlstine, former executive editor of The Wall Street journal, is the leading candidate to replace Mr. McManus.”

Even when he read the faxes, Muller didn’t believe it. He’d taken the flak over Time’s redesign. He’d taken McManus’s word that he wasn’t seen-inside Time, at least-as damaged goods. But as he returned the day’s calls from New York, Muller started hurting. And what hurt most was the message that hadn’t been left. If the leak had been wrong, McManus would have called to say so. But his voice was conspicuously absent from the answering machine’s tape. So Saturday morning, Muller booked a flight back to New York.

Monday, he was in his spacious office on the thirty-fourth floor of Time, Inc.’s mid-Manhattan headquarters, staring down through the top of his glass coffee table at a traffic jam of brightly colored toy trucks on the shelf below. He was hearing the bad news, finally, from an unimpeachable source. Time Warner’s chairman, Gerald M. Levin, was telling him that the journal had it right. Just like those trucks, Henry Muller would be parked where he was for quite some time.

Like Muller, his successor as Time’s managing editor, James Gaines, was on vacation that August week but was spending his at home, working the phones, tracking the progress of the succession. So when reporters started calling that Thursday, seeking confirmation of the rumor, Gaines wasn’t entirely surprised.

The hard truth is that both men were likely out of the race before it even began. When McManus announced his retirement, he was not granted quite the same freedom to pick his replacement as his predecessors had been. Time Warner’s board had “suggested” that he look at outside candidates-“as a reality check,” he’d later say. His predecessors had been permitted to rewrite the editor in chief’s charter-a formal corporate document meant to set the mandate for the incoming leader. But this time, Levin and Don Logan, Time, Inc.’s newly appointed chief executive officer, also had a hand in drafting the charter. Time’s next leader, McManus told his staff in his announcement memo, had to embody all the old virtues and have what it takes to drive “the growth of our new businesses in the multimedia age” and be “a frequent and forceful public spokesman.” Everything, arguably, that McManus hadn’t really been. The wheels had actually begun to turn two years before McManus retired, with a conversation that took place at Time Warner, not Time, Inc., during which Gerald Levin asked Norm Pearlstine a tantalizing-hypothetical-question. Pearlstine made a guarded-but unmistakably eager-reply. Two years later, on September 14, 1994, Time Warner’s board gave its blessing to Levin’s brainstorm.

* * *

SEVERAL DAYS AFTER his appointment, Norm Pearlstine meets a visitor in a windowless office off one of the featureless hallways that characterize even the executive floor at Time, Inc. At first glance, he is, as an ex-Wall Street journal reporter puts it, “a nerdy guy,” with rosy cheeks, bulgy brown eyes behind studious glasses, sensible shoes, and black hair that looks as though it’s been matted down with a wet palm. The overall impression of callow youth is heightened by his posture, which alternates between good-boy erect and bored-boy slouchy.

He claims to be biding his time, doing little until the new title is officially his, on the first day of 1995. “As excited as I am about the job, and as lucky as I am to have gotten it, I’m not exactly sure what it is,” Pearlstine says, but that’s probably in deference to his outgoing-but-not-yet-gone predecessor, McManus. In truth, he’s already making his presence felt in large and small ways. (How small? In his first weeks on the job, he examined layouts of People’s special section on teenage pregnancy and asked the editors, “Where are the fathers?”)

He’s inhabiting this monkish cell only until he’s moved into the lavish suite he’ll occupy and the boxes from his old job catch up with him. It was through that job, as managing partner of Friday Holdings, L. P., an ambitious media-investment boutique he formed in 1992, that he got to know Gerald Levin. Their prior relationship seems to be a sensitive subject to everyone involved in his appointment. Levin didn’t respond to requests for an interview. “Reports of their intimacy are greatly exaggerated,” insists McManus.

Still, Pearlstine acknowledges, the Levin connection has “been raised in enough places, so let me react appropriately.” He’d met Levin before, but not, he stresses, at the two schools they both attended at different times, Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Why is he answering a question that no one has asked? “As you know,” he says, “nobody has a thinner skin than an editor.”

Ultimately, though, Pearlstine doesn’t downplay the role their previous ties played in his appointment. He says they first bumped into each other in the mid eighties, on Haverford’s board. They met again when the first try at a Time Warner merger was derailed by a hostile bid from Paramount, and Wall Street journal editor Pearlstine lunched with Warner’s Steve Ross and the troika that ran Time-Dick Munro, Nick Nicholas, and Levin.

In the summer of 1992, after he resigned from the Journal, Pearlstine “approached every imaginable source” of backing for Friday Holdings, including Rupert Murdoch and the heads of Hearst, ABC-Cap Cities, Times Mirror, and the Washington Post Co. He also saw Levin, who asked why he was leaving Dow Jones and what he wanted to do.

“I am really interested in the migration of information from print to electronic distribution,” Pearlstine told the man who first put movies on satellite. Levin declined to invest immediately but said he’d like to hear more.

Pearlstine liked Levin. They had a lot in common. “He’s brilliant and hardworking, but he’s also very eclectic, and he pulls tangents out of the air that seem random-and sometimes they are random, but sometimes they’re not,” Pearlstine says. Levin tantalized him with one such tangent, asking whether his departure from the journal meant he’d turned his back on editing forever.

“I’ve already had the best job in journalism,” Pearlstine replied.

“Well,” Levin wondered, “isn’t the editor in chief of Time, Inc. a better job?”

“I sort of stopped in my tracks,” Pearlstine says. He asked Levin if the question was hypothetical.

“Of course,” Levin replied.

Pearlstine then said, “If you’re asking if that’s a great job, and if it ever became available, and if you were ever willing to look outside, would I want to talk about it, then the answer has to be yes.”

Two years later, when Jason McManus announced his plan to retire, the hypothetical became actual. Though other names had been bandied about, only one was taken seriously. “I think there are a number of people who might have raised my name,” Pearlstine says. “I hope that Gerry Levin would have been one of them.”

* * *

ASSIMILATION INTO OTHER, stuffier cultures appears to be a Pearlstine family trait. He was born in 1942 and raised in tiny Collegeville, Pennsylvania, one of several children in the only Jewish family in town. Norm’s father, Raymond, a lawyer for clients including Collegeville’s Roman Catholic church and the Philadelphia Eagles, read The Wall Street journal religiously. Norm didn’t. “I had sort of almost counterprogrammed myself to do other things,” he says.

He chose to attend tiny Haverford College on Philadelphia’s Main Line after learning that its football record was one of the worst in the nation. He figured he might make the team. (He did not. It was an early sign of the canny opportunism that has marked his career. Which is not to say that he was consumed by ambition.

“There were other compelling things,” he admits. “I learned to drink; I learned to go out and party. I thought of myself more as kind of a screwup than someone who was overachieving.” Haverford allowed women visitors in dorm rooms until 2:00 A.M. Pearlstine, who admits he’d “had very few dates in high school,” started taking as many classes as he could at the nearby all-female Bryn Mawr and ended up secretly marrying a student there named Charlene.

His professional life began after his freshman year, when he won a Dow Jones-sponsored summer internship at the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Evening Chronicle. After a second summer there and a final undergraduate internship as a police reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, “the bug really bit me,” he says. In 1964, he was en route to the Columbia School of journalism when he changed his mind at the last minute and went to law school. “I was susceptible to family pressure,” he explains. “I decided that a law degree was consistent with a career in journalism but that a journalism degree didn’t give you much mobility.” Three years later, he won a job as a news assistant at The New York Times.

Unfortunately, the day he arrived, he was told he’d be a copyboy instead. The difference was as fine as that between an amoeba and a paramecium-but it mattered to Pearlstine, who rebelled by bungling simple tasks. “I was really itchy to start writing,” he says.

An acquaintance from prep school arranged an interview that led to a reporter’s job at The Wall Street Journal. Early in 1968, Pearlstine arrived at the journal’s bureau in Dallas. He was twenty-four and single, his college marriage having failed in his last year at law school. Six weeks later, he was sent to Memphis to cover a garbage strike. A few days after that, the strike became the backdrop for a fateful moment in American history when James Earl Ray shot the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Pearlstine covered the assassination and its aftermath. Back in New York, he was noticed.

Pearlstine soon developed an MO that has become part of his reputation to this day. He liked cultivating friendships with news makers and getting close enough to feel on the inside of events. He moonlighted as a baby-sitter for one businessman he covered, an up-and-comer named H. Ross Perot. When he wrote a story on hippie icon Wavy Gravy and his Hog Farm commune, he “ended up staying close to a month and, frankly, had a crisis about whether to stay” he says. He candidly admits that he lent one of the Hog Farmers his Pontiac Bonneville for a drug run. “I don’t know whether bringing peyote and mescaline over the border from Mexico was legal or not at that point,” he notes. But it proved a turning point. “I decided to clean up my act,” Pearlstine says.

In December 1969, he transferred to Detroit, but less than two years later, the Los Angeles bureau needed an investigative reporter, and he applied for the slot. Just as he would be two decades later at Time, Inc., Pearlstine was something new in the modest, middle-American culture of the journal, where top editors never preened or partied but rather “prided themselves on making the 6:26 to Ridgewood, New Jersey, every night,” he says. He was hop, skip, and jumping the queue, snaring choice assignments. “The system was a free market,” he observes shrewdly.

When he wasn’t covering the aerospace industry, the record business, or Howard Hughes’s days in Las Vegas, Pearlstine could often be found with his new best friend and Malibu neighbor, James Brooks, a writer for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. “One afternoon, we tried to imagine what the world’s greatest job would be,” Brooks recalls. “It had to have authority, freedom, social utility, impact, and money. We both ended up voting for his job.”

Pearlstine also met his second wife, Adele Wilson, a teacher from Massachusetts, on the Malibu beach. Soon after, the journal offered him a Tokyo slot, and with Adele in tow, he crossed the Pacific in 1973. Two years later, he covered the fall of Saigon and made the front page over and over with his dispatches. “It was a week when a lot of people took notice,” he says. One was Peter Kann, who’d won a Pulitzer for the journal for his coverage of the war in Vietnam. Assigned to start the Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong, Kann chose Pearlstine as his deputy.

There they conducted themselves like young lions who would remake the institution someday. As they sifted through the copy generated in New York, deciding what they wanted for their paper, they often found it wanting-so often, in fact, that they had a rubber stamp made that read AWSJ KILL. But before Pearlstine would rise any higher in the journal hierarchy, Forties offered him the job of executive editor, based in Los Angeles, his purview being the West Coast, Asia, and the Pacific. He thought he had a shot at running Forties one day, so he walked out on the journal. “Through his whole career,” says Peter Kann, “Norm’s been different from those of us who stayed in one place.”

Eighteen months later, though, Pearlstine was back. “The journal at its best could do every story Forties wanted to do, but you couldn’t say the reverse,” he explains. Adele stayed in California when he returned to New York in June 1980 as the journal’s national editor, with a mandate to change the inside of the paper. `And I did that,” he says. But the changes-for the journal and for Pearlstine-had hardly begun.

* * *

AAH, THE JOY of seduction! To take a man, lay him down and you on top, orchestrate his sounds of slow surrender with the shifting of your weight, the forbidden dirty words whispered in your female/mother voice, watch his gradual loss of control-no, control his loss of control until ultimately, with the pressure and release of delicate vaginal muscles on his swollen penis — he comes.

-NANCY FRIDAY, FROM WOMEN ON TOP

Back when Norm Pearlstine was still picking up coeds at Bryn Mawr, Nancy Friday, five years his senior, was already a working journalist. After a stint as a reporter at the San Juan Island Times, she became editor of a travel magazine in 1961 and lost her virginity to its publisher, Michael Butler, who later gained renown as the producer of the sixties “love-rock musical,” Hair. Friday described Butler in her most recent book, Women on Top, as “an extraordinary man … my sexual emancipator.” The feeling is mutual. “Nancy was fantastic,” Butler says. “You knew you were in the presence of somebody.”

In the midsixties, she left San Juan for New York and became a self-described thrill-seeking adventurers. “What I wanted was … freedom to pursue men at a moment’s notice,” she once wrote. So she got a PR job that gave her time to dance at the hippest discos, sleep with drunken poets, and fall in lust with a man she calls Jack, who had a wife, three children, and several other lovers. Jack introduced her to marijuana and the joys of uninhibited, lingerie-less eroticism. “I walked around in a state of semiarousal in those days,” she wrote, “always conscious of what I didn’t have on.” When their relationship ended in a haze of “enough booze, grass, hallucinatory drugs, and available sexual partners to sate the greediest,” she took up with one of Jack’s friends, Bill Manville, a bartender-turned-Village Voice “Saloon Society” columnist and novelist.

Friday and Manville sailed to Europe in 1967, where the couple married and settled for the next half-dozen years. Manville wrote for Cosmopolitan. Friday wrote travel pieces but didn’t blossom until the couple came back to New York in the early seventies. She published My Secret Garden, a collection of sex fantasies that, as Newsday later put it, “launched a new and extremely lucrative career for Friday, establishing her as the liberator of the female libido” and a talk-show celebrity. My Mother, My Self-a pop-psych text, her third book-legitimized her.

The Manvilles’ apartment overlooking Central Park was the subject of a 1978 New York Times Home story that dwelled on their Sheridan sofa, Georgian silver, seventeenth-century Italian columns, and Victorian sideboard with the same acute attention to detail that Friday lavished on the masturbation fantasies she collected, polished, published, and vigorously promoted. With the proceeds, the Manvilles bought a house in Key West, Florida, where they established a salon that became a center of the last resort’s literary, libidinous, and intoxicating lifestyle.

“Nancy created a wonderful, romantic aura of her and Bill as a couple,” says a Key Wester. But in their subsequent divorce, Friday would say that they hadn’t had sex since 1976, and in 1980, they separated. Manville stayed in Florida. Friday took New York. Friends there thought she was single. In Key West, she was still Mrs. Manville. “Whenever Nancy came to visit, there was a great deal of swarming about as a professional happy couple,” says an observer. “But they never touched, never spoke.” Like many in Key West, this source speculates that Friday’s 1985 book, jealousy, explained the charade. “There was a million-dollar contract,” she says. “The book had to be produced and wouldn’t have been without Bill. Whenever Nancy came to Key West, there would be two chairs hunched in front of the computer.”

When she filed for divorce in 1986, it crushed Manville. “Inside the woman to whom he was married was another he had never known,” he writes in “The Unattainable Woman;” an unpublished novel that he’s said is “about a New York couple, a guy married to a beautiful best-selling writer and TV personality, who may or may not have gotten her start by fucking (among others Johnny Carson.” His evident anger suffuses the manuscript. The lead female character is Jean Deaux, but the name Nancy turns up, too, as an acronym for “Not Another Nagging Controller, Yes?” Two Pearlstine surrogates also put in appearances: one a rag doll named Norm that belongs to a King Charles spaniel called the Sex Criminal; the second, Jean Deaux’s engagingly eager fiancŽ, investment banker Peregrine Epstein.

Even excepting the eighteen-page sex scene calculated to recall My Secret Garden, with its adventurous dildo and gynecological table equipped with velvet handcuffs, Manville’s novel wants to make the case that he was Friday’s collaborator. “If I talked my ideas out loud, you could organize the material,” Deaux tells her husband. “If you could find the words when I’m stuck, you could help me become … the self I’ve always wanted to be.”

The question of who wrote her books was part of their bitter breakup. But among documents about interminable squabbles over property, there’s one in which Manville concedes that he “never was in any sense a collaborator or coauthor” of “works published under Nancy Friday’s name,” and that “any statement or suggestion to the contrary … are [sic] untrue.” He promises never to make such statements again-a vow he seems to be testing with his new novel-and concludes that his retraction “partially induced Nancy Friday to enter into the property-settlement agreement” that ended their relationship after their December 1987 divorce.

Nancy and Norm had already been together for years. They met at a 1981 dinner party for James Brooks, who’d used My Mother, My Self as a touchstone for his film Terms of Endearment. “She’s wildly intelligent, a Club Med for the brain,” he says enthusiastically. Norm and Nancy each called Brooks about the other after that dinner. Attraction turned to action the next year. Pearlstine was a tricoastal man, commuting between Belgium, where he was launching the European Journal; New York, where he still held the title of national editor (and had just ended a brief affair with one of his reporters; and Los Angeles, where his relationship with his second wife had, he admits, gotten “pretty strained.” At a lunch with Brooks, he learned that Friday and Manville had separated. “We ended up going out to dinner and have been together ever since,” he says.

* * *

IN THE RUN-UP To the launch of the European Journal, Norm and Nancy didn’t see much of each other. Pearlstine’s brief now was to start a newspaper from scratch; he and his crew got it up and running in four months from a suite in the Brussels Hilton. “He was extraordinarily driven at that point,” says journal editor Marty Schenker. “He was always first in and stayed the latest. It was insane to try and keep up.”

When Pearlstine’s appointment as the journal’s managing editor was announced, he was taking over a slightly weary, tradition-bound giant rather like today’s Time, Inc. “He took an insular, self-referential institution and made it a happening place,” a reporter says. He broadened coverage of the law, media, marketing, advertising, technology, personal finance, and small business; made it possible for reporters to look beyond the companies they covered and write about whole industries; and introduced a three-section paper (though he really wanted four) with a sports page. He hired so many new writers and editors that Warren Phillips, then the Dow Jones chairman, would joke that Dow Jones gave Pearlstine an unlimited budget and he exceeded it. “Budgets are for wimps,” Pearlstine would reply.

Reporters were his biggest fans. They found him an involved, inspiring, imaginative, interesting, skilled, and unselfish boss. “You’d walk off a cliff for Norm,” says Kathryn Christensen, his London bureau chief. “He’s ahead of most curves I’ve ever been aware of.” Norm raised salaries, promoted women, recruited minority reporters, and “fostered a climate of creativity and opportunity” says Bryan Burrough. He, James Stewart, and Susan Faludi blossomed into marquee names; Stewart, Dan Hertzberg, and Faludi won Pulitzer prizes. But Pearlstine’s attention wasn’t reserved for his star performers. He made a point of congratulating all reporters on their first bylines (and regularly took them out drinking). On a trip to Houston, he went to the famous Gilley’s with a bunch of reporters, rode the mechanical bull, and when he was thrown, got on it again. He never let on that when he’d fallen, he had torn ligaments in his thumb.

* * *

THE GOOD TIMES rolled as Pearlstine led the Journal through the heady eighties. Circulation peaked at just over two million. “They were turning away advertising,” a reporter marvels. “Norm was the right guy for those times-a big guy with the big picture doing big stuff.” But there were little niggling hints of things to come, even in the office of capitalism’s community newspaper. Early in March 1984, Pearlstine got a call from John Fedders, head of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, asking about a journal reporter, R. Foster Winans, who was suspected of insider trading. A few weeks later, Winans confessed. Pearlstine knew his paper would be judged on how it covered the story. “I felt it was an absolute obligation to be totally straight with our readers,” he says. `And I didn’t want to be in a position where Business Week was printing scoops about what Winans did at The Wall Street Journal.” It was a move that stands in marked contrast to Time’s decision to cover its own merger with Warner two weeks after the fact-and only in an editor’s note.

As he’d done in Dallas with Ross Perot and Wavy Gravy Pearlstine sought relationships with the decade’s star characters, people like Donald Trump, Revlon’s Ronald Perelman, Henry Kravis, and James and Linda Robinson, the former chairman of American Express and his press-agent wife. Some called Pearlstine a star fucker. He says he was cultivating sources. Either way, he and the journal were in the center of the arena. He even bought property in chic northwest Connecticut, where a barn from Fort Ticonderoga and an old Vermont railroad station had been trucked in to make “a fantasy house, rather than a conventional dwelling.”

As he ascended from news gatherer to slightly public figure, the era that made his reputation began to wane, and some of the luster faded from the journal as well. Circulation stopped growing, there was more competition, and advertising growth stalled. Not Norm. “You could see him going Hollywood,” says a reporter. He cut back on his hours. Standards slipped a bit. “He probably did become less obsessive about the job,” says Marty Schenker. “That was probably a function of his relationship with Nancy” They were married in 1988, at a Rainbow Room ceremony attended by Trump and Perelman as well as such power literati as Michael Korda, Gay and Nan Talese, and Friday’s agent and bridesmaid, Lyn Nesbit. “Everyone processed that as a move deeper into those circles,” the reporter said.

Inevitably, some blamed his wife’s influence for Pearlstine’s love of the spotlight. In 1989, he was named editor of the year by the National Press Foundation; his acceptance speech, a listener recalls, acknowledged that Friday “had taken him places he’d never been before. It was touching and out of character.” Also out of character was Pearlstine’s alleged behavior on Friday’s Women on Top publicity tour. He ended up on the New York Post’s Page Six for threatening to publish “negative stories” about the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel after Friday found their suite wanting. (He denied it happened.)

He also committed a lapse in judgment that a rookie reporter would have known to avoid when he and Nancy accepted a free helicopter ride to a heavyweight-title bout in Atlantic City from Donald Trump. “Trump!” a reporter gasps. “Of all people! The most transparent slime!” The incident slimed Pearlstine. A well-connected Wall Street trader remembers, “The word of mouth was that Norm was always sucking up, pulling stories to help his friends.”

Pearlstine says he consistently recused himself from coverage of friends like Ron Perelman, for whom Nancy Friday worked as a consultant. He admits that the ride on Trump’s helicopter was a mistake and adds that since leaving the journal, he hasn’t socialized with “the business restructurers of the eighties” at all. Friday, who has been known to accessorize her designer outfits with a studded dog collar, has said she was “sidetracked” by the values of that time. No, Pearlstine insists, it was he who dragged her to all those glitzy parties.

The serious charge that Pearlstine went easy on his nouvelle pals isn’t supported by any available evidence. “People he was friendly with got very tough scrutiny” says Warren Phillips. “He said let the chips fall as they may, and the chips fell.” The journal’s scorching, prosecutorial coverage of the decade’s end led to two best-sellers, James Stewart’s Den of Thieves and Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate. Jim and Linda Robinson, Pearlstine pals burned by Burrough’s subsequent coverage of American Express, actually stopped talking to Pearlstine. “He never wanted to go easier on anyone,” says Burrough. “His seders at the Perelmans had no impact on the work.”

The Journal’s Washington bureau chief, Al Hunt, tells a tale of Pearlstine’s integrity involving the SEC’s John Fedders, the man who’d warned Pearlstine that Foster Winans was trouble. Hunt recalls, “Six months later, I called Norm and told him I got a helluva story-a high official was an active wife-beater. He asked me who. I said `John Fedders.’ He gulped and said, `Keep me posted.’ We ran the story. Norm didn’t blink. The test is, did his relationships ever affect coverage? The answer is demonstrably no.”

Pearlstine’s fortunes at the journal may have been damaged by a relationship within the paper, though. Peter Kann, who’d been made publisher, married Karen Elliott House, the journal’s diplomatic correspondent, in 1983. The next year, Pearlstine named her foreign editor, and in 1989, she was promoted again, taking charge of all Dow Jones’s international operations, including some that Pearlstine had previously supervised. Over time, reporters came to see House’s ascent as a marker of Pearlstine’s decline in Kann’s affections. “Karen would criticize Norm quite openly and in a manner that got back to him,” a journal staffer says. “She thought Norm was not sufficiently loyal and serious. And I’m sure she and Nancy Friday had no use for each other. They’re creatures from different planets.” Kann calls this theory “total bullshit.” But Pearlstine admits that the Kann-House merger made him uncomfortable. “I’d hear from one of them at nine o’clock and the other at ten, and I’d wonder, Whose idea was this?” he recalls.

Promoted in 1991 to executive editor after expressing an urge “to be entrepreneurial,” Pearlstine never found an adequate new outlet for his energy. He tried developing a weekend magazine, a southern business magazine, and a Journal book imprint, all to no avail. Pearlstine, a man who sleeps only four hours a night, found himself stymied. “They . didn’t tell him to leave,” a reporter says. “He had nowhere to go.”

Thus, in 1992, at age fifty Pearlstine fell prey to an occupational hazard-he decided to become one of the people he covered. He pitched Dow Jones an idea about forming a company dedicated to acquiring and starting new media ventures. When Peter Kann declined, Pearlstine quit. Not long after, Texas investor Richard Rainwater, QVC (which was run by Barry Diller, a friend of James Brooks’s), and Paramount Communications all agreed to provide working capital for a first look at Pearlstine’s ventures. Nancy Friday bought part of Rainwater’s interest, and her husband named the firm after her: Friday Holdings, L.P.

In one sense, Pearlstine’s timing couldn’t have been better. He formed the company just as the buzz of interactivity, convergence, and multimedia became audible, and leveraged it on his backers, powerfully wired pooh-bahs whose names were on everyone’s tongues. But as he looked for businesses to buy, he says, he found mostly half-baked ideas and overpriced concerns. Then, four days before Friday Holdings’ first partners meeting in August 1993, Paramount chairman Martin Davis learned that Diller’s QVC was about to make a hostile bid to break up his purchase of Viacom. “So I found myself in September with two strategic partners not speaking with each other,” Pearlstine says. They never had a second partners meeting.

Even so, Pearlstine pressed ahead. “Our idea was to create a pyramid, based in low-priced, mass-appeal information services and building up to customized electronic information delivery,” says Denise Caruso, a technology writer who became Friday’s first employee. In March 1994, she started Technology & Media Group, Inc. In early August, Pearlstine announced that he was “going to dissolve the partnership and try to sell the assets,” Caruso says. Instead, he shut the operation down in September, just after Time Warner’s board approved his appointment.

* * *

“I’LL GET ALONG WITH NORM,” Henry Muller says in the weeks after Pearlstine began his new job. “This place needs a burst of energy desperately. That is more important than who gets to do it.”

“Time has always been in the hands of people bred to survive at Time,” says Landon Jones, the managing editor of People. “The Time way was the right way. But it became an albatross. There’s a sense of opening. There are a lot of new avenues.”

Of course, it may be unrealistic to expect that the lifers at Time, Inc. would be anything but enthusiastic about their new boss. But even among the elders of Henry Luce’s church, there’s an admission that it might be time for a change.

Richard Stolley, the founding editor of People and now a Time, Inc. consultant, says of Pearlstine’s appointment, “I was against breaking tradition. For emotional reasons, I preferred we stick with what had been successful in the past. Every boy can grow up to be president. I wanted to keep that dream alive inside Time, Inc. Younger staffers presumably, in the backs of their minds, had aspirations to be evaluated by traditional Time standards. All bets are off now.” But even he finds a bright side: “Things could get less predictable around here, and that might be fun.”

Indeed, instead of seeing Pearlstine as an invader, Time’s staff seems to be breathing a sigh of relief. And so, for that matter, is Pearlstine. Though he won’t admit that Friday Holdings was in any way a failure, he leaped back into front-line journalism with an eagerness that indicates where his heart really lies. Only a few days after moving to Time, for instance, he called his not-so-old backer, Barry Diller, and began peppering him with questions about the new movie studio being formed by David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

“I started pushing him on it,” says Pearlstine, who repeats Diller’s response with a certain glee.

“God,” Diller said, not bothering to hide his disdain, “You sound like an editor again.”

©1995 Michael Gross