OIL: Mr. 5%

The private life of Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian, often rumored to be the richest man in the world, was as heavily shrouded from the public gaze as the vast, subterranean oil pools on which his huge fortune was built. Gulbenkian, a square, bald man of medium height and undistinguished mien, liked it that way. "I have only one friend," he said once, "and his name is solitude." Last week, in the spacious, ornate Lisbon hotel suite where he lived since 1942, Calouste Gulbenkian, 86, slipped quietly out of the world of the living, still grasping the hand of his only friend.

In all likelihood, not even death would serve to clear up much of the mystery that surrounded Gulbenkian's life. The extent of his fortune is still a jealously guarded secret, and the incredible diversity of his financial interests was such that probably nobody but Gulbenkian himself had more than an approximate notion of them. Even the vital statistics of his life are obscured by stubborn legend. Born in a suburb of Constantinople, less than a decade after the huge oil reserves of Russia were first tapped, Gulbenkian was said to have been smuggled into England by his father at the age of three, wrapped, like Cleopatra, in a rug. Likelier history suggests that he came later and in more orthodox fashion to take an engineering degree at London's King's College. Whatever the case, his first impact on the oil business occurred when he visited the oilfields of Baku and published a scholarly article about them in a French magazine. Turkey's Director of the Privy Purse spotted the article, and Gulbenkian, a lad of 23, was on his way.

Out of the Shadows. In the many years that followed, always operating in semi-shadow while the world's oil bubbled up to power a whole new mechanical age, Calouste Gulbenkian polished the traits bequeathed him by his shrewd Armenian ancestors. He came to deal on equal terms with most of the great sovereign governments of the West, the mightiest autocratic potentates of the East and great burgeoning billion-dollar corporations. Gulbenkian himself seldom dirtied his hands with the actual pumping and selling of the oil. He was an operator, an adept at what the Armenians call bazarlik, a dim figure who, in the words of one biographer, "appeared from nowhere with a proposition and usually disappeared with a profit."

Even before the turbulent '20s, when the oil interests of the Middle East were being shuffled through a maze of complex reorganizations, Gulbenkian's talent for cutting himself in on virtually every deal earned him the sobriquet "Mr. 5%." Meanwhile, the profits he reaped were plowed into scores of other financial interests and one of the finest and most diffuse art collections in the world.