Management: The Corporate Cezanne

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Wherever he is, Simon tries to surround himself with art. His Fullerton office contains a Daumier bronze, Modigliani's Head of a Young Girl and etchings and lithographs of Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Cezanne and Jacques Villon. He recently doubled the size of his home, an ordinary-looking stone and glass ranch on an ordinary street, to provide additional display space for his collection. (An elaborate alarm system protects the art, and Simon's household staff includes regular guards.) The collection includes Caravaggio, Degas, Giorgione, Renoir, Van Gogh and another Rembrandt, a portrait of Titus' nurse Hendrickje Stoeffels, valued at $1,500,000 (TIME color, June 5, '64). Simon started collecting in 1954 and his instinct for art, largely a self-acquired one, is sharp and sure. Says a close friend, Richard F. Brown, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum: "He won't buy unless the piece is of unquestionable authenticity and supreme quality. He's tough, he's smart and he has to know all the answers be fore he lays out a couple of hundred thousand."

As a private collector, Simon ranks with late Manhattan financier Chester Dale, whose superb collection of French impressionists and post-impressionists now belongs to the National Gallery. Unlike Dale, who gathered his paintings when their artists were unknown and prices were low, Simon's acquisitions have been expensive: his most recent, Degas' Repetition de Ballet, cost $410,000 at auction last month at New York's Parke-Bernet gallery. The Degas was for his own collection, but Simon is generous to the public. The earliest financial backer of the new Los An geles museum, he gave Brown a check for $1,000,000 to get it underway, now sits on the board of directors.

Opera & Canelloni. Simon's intellectual interests reach beyond art. He regularly attends board meetings at both the University of California and Oregon's small Reed College, where he became a trustee so that he could compare the problems of small and large schools. He gets much inspiration from his wife, an avid reader and intellectual in her own right, whom Norman Cousins describes as "a sort of Insiders' Newsletter from the world of culture." Simon reads constantly in corporate reports and art books, dislikes television and watches it infrequently despite his holdings at American Broadcasting. His favorite relaxation is swimming at least twice a day in his pool, which is so close to the Wilshire Country Club golf course that an occasional hooked ball plunks in. "Norton," says his wife, "is the only one I know who will swim around at night in the dark."