Management: The Corporate Cezanne

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Simon is a cautious and secretive man who jealously guards his own privacy and, believing that he can function more effectively out of the public eye, has become known as a mysterious operator in both the business and art worlds. Such privacy, however, is increasingly hard for him to maintain. He has been deluged by a flood of requests and offers since the London sale of Titus, including thousands of pleas for handouts, dozens of propositions from art pushers, and an offer from an Englishwoman to sell him a 150-year-old pub. By dint of his business acumen, his acquisition of great art and his generosity in lending that art through the Norton Simon Foundation, he has become a national figure—whether he wanted to or not.

And an unlikely figure he is. A college dropout, he frequently talks like a tortured composite of Gertrude Stein, William Saroyan and Lord Keynes. "I am in the process of becoming," he says —period. He boasts, with absolute seriousness, that "I have a rigidity of flexibility." His view of life—and business—is more akin to Diogenes than to Donner: "I believe in a paradoxical form of life. I don't believe anything is wholly right, but both right and wrong. There is a thin line between. There is a Chi nese proverb that 'Life is a search for truth and there is no truth.' It is important to know that truth carried too far becomes destructive." How many businessmen talk like that?

Despite his enormous success, Simon is driven by a nagging sense of falling behind on things; a lover of conversation, he is frequently frustrated by his inability to articulate his thoughts. He lives modestly except for his art, will search the streets for a restaurant where he can eat for $5. Despite his brief and desultory academic background, he is a great backer of education and a regent at the University of California. Most of all, in the business life that has made possible all else that he has done, Simon is alternately a disrupting influence and a force for growth, a boardroom tyrant and a tolerant boss. Says Norman Cousins, editor of the Simon-owned Saturday Review: "There's no petty consistency to him."